Tag: E-BOOKS

Less than two weeks after Harper Collins incited a firestorm with news of its e-book library circulation cap, the American Library Association has thrown its hat into the ring. This week, one of the group's recently-convened electronic book task forces met in D.C. to draw up recommendations for an ALA response to stingy publishers' licenses. Among the recommendations suggested by the ...

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 ...

The New York Times is finally ready to add e-books to its best seller list. In addition to the print best seller list, the Times will have a dedicated e-book list, as well as a third list that combines both print and digital sales. The lists will pop up on NYTimes.com this Friday, February 11th, and in the print edition of the Sunday Book Review on February 13th. ...

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 ...

Already available on Barnes & Noble's NOOKcolor e-reader, the 'NOOK Kids' app is now available on the iPad. According to TUAW, the app features hundreds of colorful, interactive books, which it will read aloud to your kids, and also easily syncs with your NOOKcolor device. The free app, which also works on the iPhone, comes with two initial downloads -- Richard Scarry's 'Colors,' and Rudyard ...

We've already heard about how students are clinging to printed textbooks despite many of the advantages provided by e-books. Sales of electronic textbooks are expected to increase in the coming years, but growth may be relatively slow, with optimistic estimates projecting a 15-percent adoption rate by the end of 2012. But a new report from the Chronicle of Higher Education claims that some ...

The iPad and NOOKstudy were supposed to usher in the death of the traditional textbooks. Yet, for all their undeniable advantages (lower price being key amongst them, since a single semester's texts can cost up to $500) students have clung to their bound-paper tomes. But while Google searches have replaced microfiche and Skype has replaced weekly phone calls home to ask for money, the iPad and ...

PDFs viewing on an e-reader is a must-have feature. But there is a problem; many PDFs you'll find, whether passed out by professors or downloaded from free e-book sites like Project Gutenberg or Google Books, are poorly formatted for reading on the devices. There are often errant page headers and page numbers that end up in seemingly random spots of the text. You might occasionally encounter ...

The book business is changing, or better yet, it has changed. Kindles are outselling hardcover books for crying out loud! The next step, sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson hopes, could be using an online platform to sell digital books with material contributed by a team of writers and readers. According to Venture Beat, Stephenson launched the first installment of a serialized digital story called, ...

What is E Ink? "E Ink," although often used to refer to any low-power, high-contrast display like that found on e-readers, is actually a specific brand of displays. The question you should be asking is: "What is e-paper?" Alright then, what is e-paper? Jerk. E-paper is a type of display designed to mimic the appearance of ink on paper. While there are exceptions to these rules, most e-paper ...

When Barnes & Noble announced NOOKstudy a few weeks back, we were cautiously optimistic that it was an early salvo in the war on traditional textbooks. We were "really excited, less about NOOKstudy itself than for the future that it portends." Well, NOOKstudy has hit the Web, and we've given it a good once over. Does it fulfill the hype? Or, does it at least offer a tantalizing glimpse at the ...

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 ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... The absence of a legitimate RIM Twitter app has allowed services like Uber Twitter, Tweetcaster and Open Beak to enjoy great success among BlackBerry owners. After three months of waiting, RIM's official BlackBerry Twitter offering finally seems ready to exit the Beta stage, as an official version just appeared in BlackBerry's ...

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 ...