Tag: E-BOOK

Americans are increasingly doing their reading on screens, according to the Association of American Publishers. From January 2010 to January 2011, e-book sales more than doubled, increasing by 116-percent to $69.9 million. By contrast, hardbacks and paperbacks fell by 11.3- and 19.7-percent, to $49.1 million and $83.6 million respectively. By our calculations, ten years from now, "turn the page" ...

HarperCollins has placed a restriction on the number of times its e-books can be checked out from a public library. After 26 checkouts, the expired title becomes locked in the library's virtual collection until a new digital copy has been purchased. The idea is that the physical copy of a HarperCollins book would be worn out after about 26 checkouts, and the library would then have to ...

Lendle, an e-book sharing site that launched this week, allows Amazon users to borrow and lend select Kindle e-books, of which 821 are currently available, for two-week periods. All you need is at least one of the free Kindle apps for Mac, PC, iOS or Android (or a Kindle, itself). Besides that, you'll need an Amazon account and a willingness to share with others. Just make sure you return the ...

Amazon's empire is continuing to grow, with the company reporting an increase in profits of eight-percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. That growth was a little slower than expected, but the really big news from Amazon's quarterly financial report is the fact that sales of Kindle e-books have surpassed that of paperbacks. It was only in July sales of e-books passed that of hardcovers -- making it ...

Ah, what unsurprising news a year can bring! Just as everyone predicted, e-books continued to nibble at the ankles of their printed forebears this holiday season, with between three and five million e-readers activated in the week after Christmas. Barnes and Noble claimed that it sold a million e-books on December 25th alone, while Amazon's been outselling print bestsellers with digital ones since ...

The New York Times states that, on Christmas Day, "hundreds of thousands of consumers are expected to unwrap new e-readers that they received as gifts, and quickly begin downloading books to read." No surprise there, really, since Christmas Day 2009 doubled as the Bataan Death March of the popular printing press -- the first time that Amazon sold more digital books for its Kindle reader than it ...

The university textbook system is a deplorable legal racket that deprives college students of much-needed money. The books cost hundreds of dollars, return for almost nothing, produce tons of paper waste and rapidly lose relevance because of constant scientific advancement. Various universities and state governments have investigated shifting to minimally priced online and digital books, which -- ...

When it comes to managing your e-book collection, there aren't a whole lot of options out there. If you want to organize a large library of e-books, especially ones that you're not buying or downloading directly from your e-reader's manufacturer, then there's really only one viable choice: Calibre. Not only does it organize your collection and load it onto your e-reader, but it will do so ...

The Kindle may be facing stiff e-reader competition from Apple's iPad, but, when it comes to printed books, at least, Amazon's reader seems to be dominating the market pretty handily. The company says it sold approximately 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books sold over the past three months, and that gap is continuing to widen. Last month alone, for example, Amazon sold 180 Kindle books ...

James Patterson doesn't exactly write what you'd call "high literature." His thriller novels, often about a psychologist named Alex Cross, are basic bestseller tripe in the vein of Dan Brown. Patterson is far more prolific than most of his contemporaries, though, having penned 65 novels in his 33-year career. That body of work has put him in a position to be one of the foremost forces behind the ...

Do people read e-books more slowly than printed ones? A small survey by Nielsen Norman Group alleges that we may process digital words at a lazier pace than we do those on the page, but, when further analyzed, the results of the survey raise questions about the participants themselves. A group of 24 volunteers "who like reading and frequently read books" were asked to read Hemingway short ...

While most of us continue to "ooh" and "ahh" over the flood of books that have been newly digitized for iPads and e-readers, blind bibliophiles are confined to the comparatively piddling collection of digitized books published in formats accessible to them. San Francisco's Internet Archive, however, has undertaken an ambitious digital archiving project to make sure that blind and dyslexic readers ...

Reports from a publishing industry event held Tuesday afternoon suggest Google will launch the Google Editions e-book store this summer. The service, which first started popping up on our radar back in 2008, will allow Google to sell some of the books it has scanned through deals struck with publishers. At first, the store will be limited to in-print books, as is the case with the Amazon, Barnes ...

Arriving late to the party, Amazon will soon release a software update for Kindle that will allow users to browse Facebook and Twitter on their e-readers. According to Gizmodo, the Kindle 2.5 software update, which will see a limited release soon and a wide release in late May, will also include password protection, pan and zoom functions for PDFs, larger font sizes and an option to sort your ...

The launch of the iPad may have opened the door to an entirely new world of media consumption, but it's also opened up a whole new set of questions about how enhanced, e-reader consumer behavior will fit into pre-existing legal frameworks. In his New York Times ethics column, Randy Cohen entertains a particularly compelling question from a reader who asks whether downloading a pirated copy of a ...