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Posts with tag ebooks

Random House Digitizing Thousands More Books

by Peter Mychalcewycz, posted Nov 26th 2008 at 6:50AM

Laptop and Legal books on table - South African Law Reports - Shallow DOF


E-book sales are booming and Random House Inc. is reacting appropriately by digitizing thousands of tomes, increasing its digital library to around 15,000 titles.

Matt Shatz, Random House's vice president for digital operaions, points to triple digit increases in e-book sales in 2008 as the reason for the company's ramped up digital efforts. The new e-books will be available in the coming months with novels by John Updike and Harlan Cohen among the featured titles.

Ebooks still only account for 1% of the overall market, but the times they are a' changin'. Of that there is little doubt. [From: USA Today]

Google to E-Publish Out-of-Print Books Online

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Nov 11th 2008 at 8:42AM

Google Strikes Deal to Sell Out of Print Books Online
Google Book Search, while an impressive tool, has faced numerous roadblocks and lawsuits that have prevented it from reaching its full potential. Many books that have no existing copyright are available from the search giant's library, as are textbooks from many universities.

Things may finally be turning around for the company, which has a stated goal to index all of the knowledge in the world. Last month, Google settled its long-standing lawsuit with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers for $125 million. Now, Google has struck a deal to offer electronic versions of copyrighted books that are out of print.

This means that the contents of the New York Times Best Seller List still won't be available for free perusal via Google, but many hard-to-find books that have fallen out of print will once again be available for sale.

The landmark deal is still awaiting approval from the courts, but seemingly overnight Google Book Search has gone from a good (if naive) idea, to what Neill Denny (editor of trade publication The Bookseller) called the largest bookstore in the world. [From: New York Times]
Engadget

Watch Out, Kindle -- Dual-Display E-Book Mimicks Reading

by Joshua Fruhlinger, posted Jun 28th 2008 at 6:20PM



It's no surprise that more displays is always better, but when it comes to mimicking the act of reading a book, dual displays is a clear step forward. Researchers at Maryland and Berkeley Universities developed a prototype dual-face, modular e-book reader that allows readers to fan pages to advance in a book or via trackball.

If you're doing some serious research, the displays separate from one another, allowing one to display in landscape mode while the other runs in portrait. To complete the book meme, the device can be folded over to run in a more compact manner, and a simple flip changes the page. Possibilities for future e-book readers are endless here, so we applaud Maryland and Berkeley for using those research dollars. [Source: New Scientist]

Scratch-n-Sniff 'Old Book Smell' for E-Books

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Aug 24th 2007 at 5:26PM

Scratch-n-Sniff 'Old Book Smell' for Digital BooksWe're fans of good old tactility, feedback and honest to goodness sensation -- all commodities in today's increasingly digital world. That why it's always been hard for us to jump on the e-book bandwagon. Digital versions of books stored on computer-like readers lack any pages to turn or binding to break in. They certainly lack that musty aroma you soak in when cracking open an older book, which may be more important to the overall reading experience than most of us realize. After all, smell is the sense most closely tied our memory sensors.

But now, e-textbook-peddler CafeScribe is working on a solution. Beginning in September, every e-textbook purchased through the newly-launched service will include a scratch-n-sniff sticker that smells like a musty old book. The gimmick is part of a slightly bizarre attempt to woo students and universities to its e-textbooks and away from traditional paper. In a survey of 600 college students, CafeScribe found that 43 percent identified smell as the thing they most love about books as physical objects, while 30 percent associated "mustiness" with the books they most loved.

Though certainly a marketing gimmick, this is an entertaining marriage of old and new technology, and one we'd love to see packaged with more of our digital goods. Imagine if a new song downloaded from iTunes smelled like the unwrapping a new cassette tape?

From Engadget

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