Morning Coffee – 1 August 2016

Here are eight stories to read this morning. Amazon Slayed a Negative 77 Indie Bookstores in 2012 (The Digital Reader) First major database of non-native English (Phys.org) Free Standing Bookshelf: Plans to Build Your Own (Simplified Building) Hands On with the FreeWrite Hipster Typewriter (video)...

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from The Digital Reader

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” Disappoints Fans

When Harry Potter and the Cursed Child hit best-seller lists last week I expected that a lot of fans would be angry when they discovered it was a script rather than a novel. It turns out that readers were less upset about the story format than the fact that they paid $15 to $18 for what was...

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from The Digital Reader

Fact Check: If Almost Forty Percent of ABA Members Aren’t Actually Indie Bookstores, Can We Really Say There’s a Revival?

For the past several years it has been fashionable to write about the indie bookstore revival, but there's a huge problem with many of the stories: they cite data which doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Starting in 2013, many bloggers and journalists have cited the membership count of the American...

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from The Digital Reader

Paul Biba’s eBook, eLibrary and ePublishing news compilation for week ending Saturday, July 30

Editor's Note: The following is a compilation of tweets from @PaulKBiba, the former editor of Teleread. Report: “Transforming Libraries in Myanmar: The E-Library Myanmar Project” (InfoDocket) Mike Shatzkin imagines events that could upend publishing as much as the Kindle or the demise of Borders...

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from The Digital Reader

I’m e-Reading on Wider Screens Now

Nate asked me to write a short piece on what devices I’m currently using for e-reading. As it happens, there is one I’ve been using a lot lately, and what that device is—and why—might surprise you. The thing is, I haven’t been doing a whole lot of reading lately. Much of my reading has been...

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from The Digital Reader

Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House Don’t Want to Talk About Their eBook Sales

In past years the Big Five/Six touted their ebook sales as a percentage of total revenue. You sometimes had to dig for the details, but they were there to be found. That changed this week. Something tells me that they aren't quite so eager to let us in on just how poor their ebook sales have been...

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from The Digital Reader

Why Indie Authors Don’t Need to Bother With B&N’s In-Store POD Program

Last month B&N expanded its vanity press operation Nook Press with a new POD option where indie authors might possibly if they are lucky get their books into Barnes & Noble store. The coverage ranged from bland in the trade press to dismissive in the indie blogosphere, but one commentator...

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from The Digital Reader

Elon Musk Name-Drops an Out-of-Print Book, and Now It’s Even Harder to Find Than Before

Elon Musk is being touted by some as the next Oprah Winfrey after a book he recommended rapidly vanishes from store shelves. Bloomberg reports that after Musk mentioned an out of print biography in an interview earlier this week, all existing copies were snapped up online as the price went through...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 29 July 2016

Here are eight stories to read this morning. 5. Textbooks Show Aging Signs: Curated Guides Are Next (Content Curation Official Guide) Blasty Vaporizes Pirated Content in Google Search Results (The Digital Reader) Photographer Files $1 Billion Suit Against Getty for Licensing Her Public Domain...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon Revenue Beats Estimates as Cloud Sales Surge

Amazon reported a better-than-expected rise in quarterly revenue, powered by blockbuster growth in its cloud services unit and an increase in subscriptions for its Prime loyalty program. The world's biggest online retailer's shares were up 2 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday. Amazon...

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from The Digital Reader

Tomorrow’s the Last Day to Voluntary Download Windows Ten for Free (Future Downloads Will be Involuntary)

The Verge reminds us that 29 July is the last day to voluntarily download Windows X for free. Microsoft released Windows 10 almost a year ago on July 29th, 2015. The software maker has offered its latest OS to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users as a free upgrade for the past year, but that offer is...

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from The Digital Reader

Rakuten Invests in Book Summary Service getAbstract

CliffNotes has the mindshare, and SparkNotes the established retailer as a parent, but getAbstract is the service which has picked up an investment today. The Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten, owner of OverDrive, Kobo, and Aquafadas, announced on Thursday that it is set to acquire a “substantial...

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from The Digital Reader

Kobo Teases August Launch Date for its New 7.8″ eReader. the Aura One

A little over a month ago Kobo's next two ereaders showed up on the FCC website, and now it appears we'll be seeing the hardware itself in a couple weeks. Last night Kobo CEO Micheal Tamblyn tweeted a teaser image which showed part of the backside of some device. For the sake of neatness, I cropped...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 28 July 2016

Here are six stories to read this morning. Book now: German readers get extra baggage allowance for holiday reading (The Guardian) The Copyright Office is trying to redefine libraries, but libraries don’t want it — Who is it for? (Internet Archive) PRH hunts for writers from 'under-represented'...

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from The Digital Reader

No, Serialized Fiction WON’T Convert Binge Watchers Into Binge Readers

The year may be barely half-done but it's clear that 2016 is the year that the hype over serialized novels reached its peak. Harlequin and other publishers have published serial novels, Simon & Schuster and indie startups have launched serial reading apps, and now we have the media asking...

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from The Digital Reader

Google Play Family Library Lets (Some) Share eBooks, Other

Google formally announced the launch of its family library sharing plan today, showing that early reports of Google Play Family Library's flawed design were greatly exaggerated. Google announced on its official blog on Wednesday that users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland,...

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from The Digital Reader

German Airline Now Giving Passengers a Whole Extra Kilogram Baggage Allowance for Books

Publishing Perspectives is making a big deal out of a little promotion currently being by Condor Airlines: German airline Condor and Vorsicht! Buch, a marketing initiative of the German book trade, have jointly launched a summer campaign to promote reading: travelers on Condor are allowed one extra...

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from The Digital Reader

New Harry Potter Script Book is the Most Pre-Ordered of 2016 – Will It Also be the Most Disappointing?

As I am sure you know, the latest installment in the Harry Potter saga is now one of the most popular books of the year. The new broke first last week that Amazon (and then this week, Barnes & Noble) had revealed that the new book had set  a record for pre-orders. B&N is expecting it to be...

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from The Digital Reader

InfoGraphic: The Wands of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter

JK Rowling is far from the first to write about witches and wizards, but few writers invested as much time in describing mundane details of the wands used by various characters. The following infographic shows all of the wands from the Harry Potter books and movies, including Lord Voldemort's (13",...

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from The Digital Reader

AAP Reports eBook Revenues Down 18.7% in February 2016

The Association of American Publishers has released its monthly report for February 2016, and for the most part the news is bad. Total trade revenues for the 1,200 odd publishers which submit their data to the AAP were down about 1% from February 2015 and down 8.2% for the Jan--Feb period. YA and...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 26 July 2016

Here are five stories to read this morning. Alan Moore uses nine-year-old's fan letter on new book's cover (The Guardian) On Gendered Book Covers and Being a Woman Designer (Literary Hub) An Open Letter to Authors At Tables In Bookstores (BookRiot) The subtle art of translating foreign fiction (The...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon Gets Permission from UK to Explore Drone Deliveries

Amazon announced on Monday it has entered into a partnership with the British government to speed up the process for allowing small drones to makes deliveries. The world's biggest online retailer, which has laid out plans to start using drones for deliveries by 2017, said a cross-government team...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon Updates Kindle Product Images to Show Grayer Screens

When the new basic Kindle launched last month, some users complained that the screen was grayer on the new Kindle than on other Kindle models. I had initially dismissed the gripes as being the result of having an E-ink screen next to a bright white bezel, but apparently Amazon has decided there's...

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from The Digital Reader

Why Johnny Can’t Write

A British teacher wrote anonymously in The Guardian on Saturday about how the US's latest mistake in public education has crossed the pond and is now ruining the academic careers. Where in the US we have teachers finding themselves forced to teach a writing method which unintelligible while still...

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from The Digital Reader

New Survey Shows Used and Rented Textbooks Still Trump e-Textbooks

Digital textbooks are one of those ideas which publishers and technologists love but students don't like so much. They failed to catch on for a couple obvious reasons (money, and the fact that college students lack the same) and as a recent survey showed us this is still true in 2016....

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 25 July 2016

Here are seven stories to read this morning. Big data matters but textual analysis really does not (The Shatzkin Files) Blockchain: Panacea or Pandemic? (The Trichordist) I've Read the Past, And It Hurts (The Digital Reader) Publisher restrictions on ebooks & impact in India (MediaNama) Secret...

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from The Digital Reader

A Solution for the Problem of Getting Rid of Books

Ebook lovers never have to worry about the size of their libraries, but Christina Spencer isn't so lucky. She writes in the Ottawa Citizen that she needs a self-help books for getting rid of books: How, after all, does one decide which books to discard or donate? Which criteria apply to such a...

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from The Digital Reader

Financial Times is Taking a MadLibs Approach to Fighting Ad Block Users

Web publishers have been trying a variety of methods to discourage the use of ad blocking plugins, including nag screens, paywalls, and outright blocks. Now the Financial Times is taking a new passive aggressive approach. Ad Age reports that the FT is now turning its articles into MadLibs for a...

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from The Digital Reader

How Many eBooks Do You Have on Your Kindle?

Last week's post about packing books for a vacation got me thinking about how many ebook you can carry on an ereader. The columnist in the Spectator may have struggled with keeping the weight down on vacation paper book library, but those of us who have taken up with the ones-and-zeros have no such...

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from The Digital Reader

Buzzword Bingo: How Blockai Says the Blockchain Will Protect Your Copyright, and Other Nonsense

Bitcoin and other pseudo-currencies are a hot topic right now, and startups are coming up with all sorts of ways to take advantage of the buzz by launching services which use buzzwords to hide the fact that they don't actually do anything new. Take Blockai, for example. TNW tipped me to this...

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from The Digital Reader

Paul Biba’s eBook, eLibrary and ePublishing news compilation for week ending Saturday, July 23

Editor's Note: The following is a compilation of tweets from @PaulKBiba, the former editor of Teleread. Romance Makes up 4% of Print, and 45% of eBook Sales (The Digital Reader) Kindle Unlimited Payout, Funding Jumps in June 2016 (The Digital Reader) eMusic Relaunches Audiobook Store as eStories...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon is Still Sending Emails About That Required Kindle Update

Remember a few months back when Amazon asked all Kindle owners to download and install a security update? No? Amazon remembers. They sent emails, post cards, and made phone calls in February and March informing Kindle owners about a mandatory security update, and this week they started sending out...

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from The Digital Reader

Onyx Boox Max 13.3″ Android eReader Now Available from Amazon.com

When it initially shipped earlier this year, the Onyx Boox Max was only available through a single retailer in Europe, and now the 13.3" document display device more widely available. The Boox Max is now being carried on Amazon by a third-party seller for $799, and it can also be found at Chinese...

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from The Digital Reader

Do Students Lose Depth in Digital Reading?

Do students learn as much when they read digitally as they do in print? For both parents and teachers, knowing whether computer-based media are improving or compromising education is a question of concern. With the surge in popularity of e-books, online learning and open educational resources,...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 22 July 2016

Here are nine stories to read this morning. The Biblioracle: Why bookstores are more than places that sell books (Chicago Tribune) Books Are Really Pathetic: Trump, Probably (MobyLives) Donald Trump Threatens the Ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal” (The New Yorker) Harry Potter script the most...

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from The Digital Reader

Bubble Zoom is Google’s Half-Hearted Solution to Reading Comics on a Small Screen

Many digital comics still based on the 6.5" x 10.25" floppy, and that simply doesn't work on a 7" or smaller screen. This is why Amazon, B&N, and Comixology each have their own version of a directed reading mode which moves the reader from one frame of the comic to the next. Now Google has...

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from The Digital Reader

Penguin’s New Line of Books Will Explore the Secret Lives of Emoji

Hollywood catches considerable flack for making movies about board games, those little troll toys, and amusement park rides rather than coming up with new and original stories. Now Penguin Random House has demonstrated that it can be just as unoriginal as Hollywood. Last year Penguin published new...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon Enters Student Loan Business in Partnership With Wells Fargo

Amazon has long focused on being the one-stop shop for college students, and now its adding student loans to its catalog. Amazon entered the student loan business in a partnership with Wells Fargo on Thursday, offering cheaper rates for loans to Amazon customers who pay for a "Prime Student"...

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from The Digital Reader

Hachette, Booktrack Partner to Stave Off the Inevitable Technological Obscurity of Soundtracked eBooks

Here's an interesting bit of obscure ebook tech you might want to try before it disappears into the scrapheap of history. PW reports: Hachette’s Little, Brown Books for Young Readers is partnering with Booktrack, a technology platform offering customizable soundtracks and sound effects for e-books,...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 21 July 2016

Here are five stories to read this morning. Buffy the Vampire Slayer gets adult coloring book (EW.com) How to Jailbreak Your Kindle (LifeHacker) More Copyright Law ? Less Copyright Infringement (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Top 7 Book Reviewer Complaints (Indies Unlimited) What If I’m Actually a...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon’s Counterfeit Problem Replaced by Actual Fraud as Birkenstock Quits Amazon

Amazon's problems with dishonest marketplace sellers passing off knock-offs as the real thing has just gone from bad to worse. The sandal-maker Birkenstock has taken the counterfeit problem to heart, and it has decided to pull its merchandise from Amazon and forbid any retailer from selling in...

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from The Digital Reader

The Perils of Taking Too Many Books on Your Holiday Trip, and Other 1% Problems

The Spectator has a solution for anyone who is haunted by the prospect of having too much to read while vacationing on the French Riviera: Holidays are a welcome chance to lose ourselves between the covers of a book, especially for those of us who struggle to find time to read amid the assorted...

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from The Digital Reader

What Happens When You Try to Read Moby Dick on Your Smartphone?

These days, when most of us think of a “book,” we have in mind something around nine inches by six inches, with mass market paperbacks shaving off an inch or two in each dimension. But digital reading has redefined presuppositions about size and, more importantly, about what format is best for...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 20 July 2016

Here are seven stories to read this morning. The bizarre books by Baton Rouge police shooter Gavin Eugene Long, aka Cosmo Setepenra (LA Times) Copyright in Small Claims: An Update (IO: In The Open, The Passive Voice) A Fan's Case For Putting Batman & Superman In The Public Domain (Techdirt) The...

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from The Digital Reader

Indigo Goes Where Amazon, B&N, Goodreads, and a Dozen Publishers and Startups Have Dared to Tread

The Canadian media retailer Indigo has apparently decided that there aren't enough book recommendation apps in the world, so they are launching one with the unique and original name of RECO: What separates RECO from similar apps, according to a press release, is that its recommendations are curated...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon Announces Kindle Singles Classics

Amazon launched a new publishing imprint in the Kindle Store on Tuesday. Dubbed Kindle Singles Classics, the new imprint expands on the Kindle Singles imprint with a new focus on "iconic articles, stories and essays from well-known authors". 137 titles are available now, all priced at 99 cents...

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from The Digital Reader

Google Play Books v3.9 Tells You When There’s a New Addition to the Series You’re Reading

Google released a major update yesterday for its ebook app for Android with a couple useful features as well as hints of future features hidden in the code. The app now features a suggestive search function where users are offered names as well as titles from their library. The other new feature is...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 19 July 2016

Here are six stories to read this morning. How I Was Sabotaged by Microsoft (History News Network) Police Confiscate Thousands of Books from Upper West Side Street Vendors (DNAinfo) The secret to better holiday reading: don’t take too many books (The Spectator) Trump’s Boswell Speaks (The New...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon’s Kindle Discussion is Less a Discussion than a Consumer Focus Group

On Friday Amazon announced that it would be holding a discussion this week in the Kindle support forums. We're now six hours into the so-called discussion, and anyone who was expecting an actual discussion is going to be soundly disappointed. Rather than respondf to questions from readers, Amazon's...

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from The Digital Reader

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Script Book Up for Pre-Order

The long-promised new installment in the Harry Potter saga went up for pre-order today on Amazon and B&N. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is less the eight novel in the series than it is a copy of the script for the stage play of the same name. The book is due out at the end of the month,...

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from The Digital Reader

Amazon is Hosting a Kindle Discussion at 10am Today.

Amazon has long maintained an email account where Kindle users could send suggestions and requests (and someone reads the emails, too). Now the retailer is going to hold a town hall meeting. On Friday Amazon posted a notice on the Kindle support forums with the news that they are going to be...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 18 July 2016

Here are eight stories to read this morning. Four Reasons PDFs Are Better Than Epub (The Digital Reader) Frankly Useless Crank “Knowledge,” Only For Fools (Strong Language) Nick Denton Says Giving Up on Reader Comments Is a Big Mistake (Fortune) Please shut up: Why self-promotion as an author...

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from The Digital Reader

Microsoft So Wants You to Upgrade to Windows 10 That They’ll Bet You a New Laptop

Microsoft has moved on from interrupting news broadcasts, ruining businesses, and tricking people with Windows 10 upgrades. Now MS is offering free in-store upgrades, and dangling the promise of a free Dell laptop if they can't get it done the same day. From WinBeta: Maybe in realizing they’ve...

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from The Digital Reader

Unnamed 6.8″ eReader Clears the FCC

About two months back the Chinese ereader maker Netronix filled FCC paperwork for an unnamed ereader. All the more interesting details like internal photos were concealed under an embargo, but last week that embargo expired. We still don't know who this device belongs to, but now we know what we're...

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from The Digital Reader

Sony Drops the Price of the DPT-S1 Writing Slate to $599

When Sony announce its 13.3" writing slate several years ago, it cost a princely $1,100. Now the price has dropped to about half that. Sony is now selling the DPT-S1 Digital Paper through Amazon and B&H Photo for the low, low price of $599. Far from being your average ereader, the DPT-S1 has a...

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from The Digital Reader

Kindle Unlimited Payout, Funding Jumps in June 2016

Amazon announced on Friday that funding for Kindle Unlimited rose in June 2016, to $15.4 million. That represents a slight but noticeable increase of $100k from May 2016, and a new peak for the funding pool. Reports from authors show that the per-page royalty rate also rose in June in most markets....

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from The Digital Reader

Romance Makes up 4% of Print, and 45% of eBook Sales

Data Guy gave a presentation at the RWA conference this week, and yesterday he posted the slides to the Author Earnings Report website (as a 128MB PDF - WTF?). He revealed to attendees what many had long suspected: romance titles dominate the US ebook market. As you can see from the slide below,...

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from The Digital Reader

Pronoun Launches a Blog – The Verbs

The self-pub platform Pronoun has just launched its first new initiative since being acquired by Macmillan in May 2016. Earlier this week Pronoun announced that it had launched a blog called The Verbs (it was actually about a week old by the time the news crossed my desk). Pronoun describes their...

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from The Digital Reader

What’s the Oddest Thing You’ve Found in a Little Free Library?

Little Free Libraries are supposed to be small structures where members of a community can leave or take a book with no fee or paperwork. But sometimes it doesn't work out that way. Writing for Alternet.org, Dan Greenstone says that the Little Free Library, which his wife bought and he installed in...

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from The Digital Reader

Paul Biba’s eBook, eLibrary and ePublishing news compilation for week ending Saturday, July 16

Editor's Note: The following is a compilation of tweets from @PaulKBiba, the former editor of Teleread. Amazon Kindle exec Mike Torres tells everything you wanted to know about Page Flip (Teleread)) Hot Summer News from Wattpad HQ (Wattpad) A Jailbreak for Every Kindle (Hackaday) Research Tools:...

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from The Digital Reader

KoboNotes.com Extracts Notes and Highlights from Your Kobo eReader

Amazon makes it easy for Kindle users to download their notes and highlights, but we can't say the same for Kobo, which obscures a user's notes in a database file. Fortunately, there's a solution. I've just read on MobileRead about a new site called KoboNotes.com which can extract the notes on your...

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from The Digital Reader

New Legislation Would Create a Small Claims Court for Copyright Infringement

Now would be a good time to invest in North Face, because Hell hath frozen over. The Authors Guild is backing a piece of legislation I can actually support: Today Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill, entitled the Copyright Alternative in...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 15 July 2016

Here are seven stories to read this morning. Business Musings: Discount Abuse (Contracts/Dealbreakers) (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) Facebook makes opening links in Messenger 10 times faster (TNW) How The Washington Post grew digital subscriptions 145 percent (Digiday) Is ‘devouring’ books a sign of...

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from The Digital Reader

Google Deletes Artist’s Blog: He Has No Backup, and Only Himself to Blame

The original is on the right; the bad copy on the left. Google has just given us another reminder why we should always have an independent backup. From Fusion: Artist Dennis Cooper has a big problem on his hands: Most of his artwork from the past 14 years just disappeared. It’s gone because it was...

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from The Digital Reader

Books Delivered in an Hour, in London?

The Guardian has the scoop on a London-based startup which wants to challenge Amazon by delivering books in an hour or less. At Ink@84, an independent bookshop in Highbury, north London, an order pinged in on Thursday morning for Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. The Pulitzer prize-winning...

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from The Digital Reader

Virginia Authors Unite to Sell Books and Support a Cancer Charity

Should you happen to be near Manassas, Virginia next week, there's a book sale you might be interested in. Local bookseller McKay Used Books will be hosting a sale on Saturday, 30 July. Eight Virginia authors from Write by the Rails, the Prince William County chapter of the Virginia Writers...

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from The Digital Reader

eMusic Launches as eStories, an Audiobook Service with 80,000 Titles

Following its acquisition late last year, eMusic has relaunched its audiobook service as eStories. Based on the Findaway platform, eStories offers a catalog of 80,000 audiobook titles which can be listened to in your browser or on Android, iPad, or iPhone. The audiobooks cab be bought individually,...

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from The Digital Reader

Morning Coffee – 13 July 2016

Here are nine stories to read this morning. Barnes & Noble Throws Self-Publishers a Bone (Future Of Publishing) B&N Education's New Cosmetics Dept is the Death Knell for College Bookstore (The Digital Reader) The "Big Change" era in trade book publishing ended about four years ago (The...

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from The Digital Reader

Annoying and Disruptive Ads , and Malware, Are Top Three Reasons People Use Ad-Blockers

Hubspot and AdBlock Plus developer Eyeo have released the results of a strangely redundant survey on why people use ad blocking plugins on their sites. A total of 1,055 people were polled online in US, UK, Germany, and France, in June of this year. Thanks to quotas about 70% of the survey group...

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from The Digital Reader

Luddite Agonizes Over Choosing Books for a Hike

  Writing on the Powell's Books blog about a months-long hiking trip, Robert Moor reports on how he agonized over how to bring reading material on the trip. The problem, of course, is that paper — when bound into brick-like stacks — is surprisingly heavy. All the same, I was reluctant to trade...

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from The Digital Reader

Google Play Family Library is a Bass-Ackward Way to Share eBooks, Other Content With Up to Six People

Google has finally taken the covers off its family library system for its Google Play services, and the feature is just as badly designed as when we first heard about it in December 2015. The way the family library feature is supposed to work is that one person sets themselves up as a manager of a...

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Why You Should Take the AAP Statshot Annual Revenue Data With a Grain of Salt

Editor's Note: An email from the eponymous Data Guy crossed my desk this morning which I would like to share with you. He's seen the data from yesterday's post on the AAP's Statshot Annual report, and he recommends that you take it with a grain of salt. With his permission, I am publishing the...

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Prime Day Fail: Amazon’s Website is Broken For Many Customers

Amazon has put the new basic Kindle ($50), the Paperwhite ($90), and even the Voyage ($150) on sale for Prime Day, but not everyone is enjoying the good fortune. According to Reuters: Amazon said on Tuesday it resolved a glitch that made it difficult for customers to add products to their shopping...

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Amazon Has Reportedly Been Hacked, and Details on 84,000 Kindle Account May Have Been Stolen

A story came out late last week which, if true, represents a serious breach of Amazon's security. Mic reported on Friday that a hacker penetrated Amazon's servers and made off with over info from over 80,000 accounts. A hacker declared war on the Baton Rouge Police Department after one of its...

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Morning Coffee – 12 July 2016

Here are five stories to read this morning. Amazon Prime Day is a raw deal for e-book buyers (Yahoo Finance) Detecting (and Stopping) Robot Pirates (The Scholarly Kitchen) Is Editing a Book Like Home Repair? (Indies Unlimited) NYTimes Public Editor Scolded For Suggesting Sites Should Treat News...

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Kindle Paperwhite, Fire Tablet on Sale for Prime Day

12 July is a special day for Amazon Prime members. It’s a Tuesday, which is special in and of itself, and it is also Amazon Prime Day. Prime Day is Amazon's excuse to run a bunch of sales in July. It kicks off at midnight (pacific) tonight, and runs for 24 hours. Amazon so going to be launching new...

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Tor.com Launches eBook of the Month Club

Macmillan's SF community Tor.com has launched a free ebook of the month club. It's open to all residents of the US and Canada, and all you have to do is sign up for the mailing list. The ebooks will be given away in DRM-free Epub and Mobi, and will be available to download during the first week of...

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Amazon to Open New Pick-up Location at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Amazon announced their 14th college campus unstore on Monday. It's going to open this fall in Urbana, Ill., at the University of Illinois. The 2,200-square-foot space will be located in the Illini Union building on the UIUC campus. It's going to be a staffed pickup location where students and...

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AAP Estimates Publisher eBook Revenue Shrank in 2015

The Association of American Publishers has released its annual estimates for the US book industry revenues, and the news is mixed. Not to be confused with the monthly reports by the same name, Statshot Annual is an industry estimate based on data supplied by 1,800 publishers. The report shows that...

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Has Agency eBook Price Controls Changed Your Reading Habits? (It Did For Me)

Earlier today Felix left a comment on my post about the 2016 Kindle's lack of accessibility features. He remarked on how I seemed to use the same author's series in many of the screenshot's posted to this blog. Side note: you really like your Honor Harrington, don't you? This isn't the first time...

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Texture is Offering a Free Fire Tablet w\Six Month Sub – Good Deal

If you're in the market to get a Fire tablet, or perhaps want to check out Texture's Netflix-style magazine subscription service, then I have the deal for you. Texture is now offering new subscribers a free Fire tablet (8GB  or 16 GB) when they sign up for a six month subscription to their magazine...

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CSI: Poetry. The Life and Death (Ok Just Death) of Poets

My Poetic Side has combed their database and compiled an infographic of the leading causes of death for poets. Given the archetype of a poet suffering for their art in a poorly-insulated garret, one might think that frostbite or hypothermia would be a leading cause, but no. The mortal wound of a...

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Morning Coffee – 11 July 2016

Here are seven stories to read this morning. Ebooks and ‘the tyranny of messaging and notifications’ (Teleread) Fair Use Threatens Innovation, Copyright Holders Warn (TorrentFreak) How to Host a Vintage Library-Themed Party (Book Riot) Publishing’s scary self-delusion (madgeniusclub) Twenty Years...

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The 2016 Kindle is Complete Crap as an Accessible eReader

Following my Kindle review yesterday, several readers asked me what I thought of the Bluetooth option and the Voiceview accessibility feature. I couldn't test that feature because I didn't own a Bluetooth speaker (or any other BT accessories for that matter), so today I went out and bought a couple...

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Amazon’s Counterfeit Problem is Also an Opportunity

CNBC has a report this week which details how Amazon is quickly shifting from a great place to shop and a trusted retailer to being the next iteration of Ebay and flea markets. The report focuses on the counterfeit problem, but it's really just the beginning of Amazon's problems: "Amazon is making...

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Review: Kindle (2016)

The first shipments of the new Kindle model started to arrive on doorsteps over the past few days. My loaner review unit showed up on Thursday morning, and I've spent the past three days playing with it (it makes for an awesome discus). I choose the white model for the sake of trying something new,...

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Audible Channels is Free to Existing Audible Subscribers

Earlier this week Audible expanded its three-month-old podcast streaming service Channels and opened it to the public. Channels is why Audible had been hiring all that public radio talent over the past year or so. It falls somewhere between a podcast service and streaming talk radio. From...

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Paul Biba’s eBook, eLibrary and ePublishing news compilation for week ending Saturday, July 9

Editor's Note: The following is a compilation of tweets from @PaulKBiba, the former editor of Teleread. Calisphere, the University of California’s Gateway to Digital Collections Adds Expert Curated “Exhibitions” (InfoDocket) 50 untranslatable words from around the world  (The Digital Reader) ALM...

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Paul Biba’s eBook, eLibrary and ePublishing news compilation for week ending Saturday, July 9

Editor's Note: The following is a compilation of tweets from @PaulKBiba, the former editor of Teleread. Calisphere, the University of California’s Gateway to Digital Collections Adds Expert Curated “Exhibitions” (InfoDocket) 50 untranslatable words from around the world  (The Digital Reader) ALM...

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Rimowa’s E-ink Luggage Tag is Why Your Next Suitcase Might Vanish

Airlins have been experimenting with electronic luggage tags for the past several years, and now a German luggage manufacturer has come up with a design which is bound to cause an unending stream of problems. Engadget has a report on Rimowa's new line of hard case luggage with integrated E-ink...

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Retraction: Crossroad Reviews

Earlier this week I reported on a social media frenzy against Crossroad Reviews for the way they supposedly were selling multiple copies of ARCs they had picked up at conventions and received from publishers and authors. Today I am retracting that story. It has been brought to my attention that the...

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No, You Can’t Predict a Best-Seller by Analyzing a Book’s Contents

The Independent has a report on the latest group of outsiders who think they are going to disrupt the book publishing industry. The last one was a startup which wanted to eliminate the middleman by becoming a middleman, and now someone thinks they can predict the next best-seller simply by running...

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Onyx Boox C67ML Android eReader Now Available With 300 PPI Carta E-ink Screen – $157

Around this time last year Onyx updated their C67ML Android ereader with double the storage and a Carta E-ink screen, and that worked out so well for them that they are doing it again. The Chinese gadget retailer Banggood is now carrying a new C67ML model on its site. The new model looks...

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Boston Installs E-ink Sign in Front of City Hall

Last week the city of Boston and E-ink installed a new information sign for tourists on the City Hall plaza. Based on a 32" E-ink screen,  the sign is powered by solar panels and offers tourists information on local events and help residents and visitors locate nearby landmarks. "There are...

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Morning Coffee – 7 July 2016

Here are five stories to read this morning. The 7.5? Teclast X89 Kindow dual-boot tablet is a lot of value for a little money (Teleread) Gay Talese Isn't Alone: Why Aren't More Books Factchecked? (The Daily Beast) How Indie Authors Can Get Their Books Into Libraries (BookWorks) My Mother is Gone,...

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PSA: Crossroad Reviews Called Out for Selling Arcs as a Business

Authors and publishers know that they often have to give away ARCs (advanced reader copies) of their books to bloggers, reviewers, and librarians in order to build the early buzz. They also know that some bloggers exploit the situation and resell ARCs for personal gain. This problem actually...

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Did You Know You Can Play Games in PDF Files?

PDFs are now known simply for being the most universal document (fixed layout or not), but as developer Omar Rizwan showed us recently, they are capable of so much more. While researching Adobe’s PostScript programming language, Rizwan learned that PDFs can support things like audio and video...

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The Latest Supreme Court Ruling On Kirtsaeng Hints at a Possible Expansion of Fair Use,

When the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the defendant in Kirtsaeng v. Wiley in 2013, many people thought that upholding the first sale doctrine would be the only legacy of Kirtsaeng, but the most recent ruling offers a bonus to fair use advocates. Last month's ruling focuses on...

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The Elephant in the Room: Why Hollywood is Ignoring Octavia Butler (and Other) SF Writers

I wanted to address one of the stories in this morning's link post. Writing for Fusion, Shawn Taylor tries to argue that Hollywood (and the tv studios) is taking special care to ignore the works of Octavia Butler, a black SF author. While that is true to a degree (there is a racial bias in tv and...

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New 13.3″ Mobius E-ink Screen is About to Enter Production

When the Onyx Boox Max was first revealed to the public early last year, it sported a new and much higher-resolution 13" E-ink screen. Alas, that screen wasn't ready for production, so when the Max officially launched a month later it used the same screen as found on the Sony Digital paper DPT-S1....

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Amazon Launches “Edition M” Thriller/Mystery Imprint in Germany

Amazon announced on Wednesday that it was expanding its three-year-old German publishing division with the launch of a new imprint. According to Boersenblatt, Edition M will be a crime imprint for German-language detective novels and thrillers. The first five original titles will be released in...

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Morning Coffee – 6 July 2016

Here are eight stories to read this morning. Amazon Is Quietly Eliminating List Prices (The New York Times) Amazon KDP and Kindle Unlimited: What It Means for Authors and Publishers (Written Word Media) 'Bright orange beasty' Trump gets his own picture book  (The Guardian) Documentary About Freeing...

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Ghost-Writing Reaches the Gig Economy

Ghost writing is an established practice in the book publishing industry (who cares whether the name on the cover is the actual author, amirite?) but now the practice has entered the digital age and is getting a new polish and a new layer of marketing. Forbes has a report on a startup which has...

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“Plus Tips”, Or Why Your Next Book Won’t be Delivered by an Amazon Un-Employee

Ars Technica signed up to drive for Amazon's outsourced delivery service a few days back, and their report identifies a couple fundamental problems with the so-called "sharing economy". Late last year, Amazon launched a pilot program in one of its biggest Amazon Prime Now markets to ship more...

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Amazon Is Quietly Selling Top Placement in Its Search Results

Amazon is now copying Google's trick of selling the prime location in search results to advertisers. I was looking into the NY Times story on Amazon dropping list prices on Monday morning when I found this in the search results. What I see in this screen shot is: at the top of the screen is a...

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Morning Coffee – 5 July 2016

Here are six stories to read this morning. Hard-Core Bookish Insults (Book Riot) How Amazon’s team of old-school book reviewers influences what we read (The Seattle Times) If Philip K. Dick’s Writing is Terrible, Then Is Sci-Fi Terrible? (Inverse) Indie Author Day (Indies Unlimited) Life Behind the...

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Amazon to Open Bookstore in Manhattan?

Here we were, planning to enjoy the 4th of July, when this story crossed my desk. According to the NY Post, Amazon is planning to open a bookstore and cafe on the island of Manhattan: Amazon Books is slated to open in Hudson Yards, the massive retail, commercial and residential space developed by...

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Audible Brings Social Sharing to its Android App

Audible rolled out an update to its Android app on Friday which added a few tweaks. In addition to the usual bug fixes and other updates, Audible improved its channel feature and started syncing the "finish" status across devices. But the most notable feature in this update is Clip. Initially...

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An Unimportant Tablet Maker is Exiting the Market

Everyone was surprised to learn this week that Dell was going to stop making tablets. (What was even bigger news was that Dell was making tablets in the first place. Now that was a shock.) According to PC World, Dell is shifting its mobile device attention back to Windows: Dell has stopped selling...

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Paul Biba’s eBook, eLibrary and ePublishing news compilation for week ending Saturday, July 2

Editor's Note: The following is a compilation of tweets from @PaulKBiba, the former editor of Teleread. Let European copyright catch up with reality (Wikimedia blog) B&N Claims 9% of eBook Market Has 2M Nook Users, Pins Future on Vinyl and Other Highlights from Investor Phone Call (The Digital...

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Why the Fire Tablet Still Sucks for Reading eBooks – a Rant

In 2012 Marcello, the webmaster for Project Gutenberg, posted a review of the then new Kindle Fire HD tablet. His opinion, to put it simply, was that you should buy another similarly priced Android tablet to read on, because the Fire HD sucked for reading ebooks not bought from Amazon. When I...

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Nook for iOS 4.6 Adds Free eBook Downloads, Support for Enhanced eBooks

  B&N's development of Nook software may have slowed to a crawl since they outsourced support to an Indian company, but it hasn't completely stopped. Barnes & Noble rolled out an update for its app for iPad and iPhone on Wednesday. The update adds a nighttime reading mode similar to...

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The Paulig Muki Coffee Mug Lets You Post Updates to its E-ink Screen

For the past couple years the Finnish coffee company Paulig has been working on a connected coffee mug, and now it is finally up for pre-order. The Paulig Muki is an insulated coffee mug with a 2.7" E-ink screen. It's powered by the coffee you pour into it, and connects over Bluetooth to your...

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XO Infinity Modular Laptop Goes Up For Pre-Order Minus Its Modular Design

When I broke the news on the XO Infinity laptop from One Education (OLPC Australia) last spring, it featured a modular design where you could replace the CPU, battery, screen, storage, etc. You could have thought of the design we saw last year as the Project Ara for educational laptops, but you...

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