Yesterday was the start of the 2010 Read an E-Book Week. The Week, recognised by Chase’s Calendar since 2004, is designed to educate and inform the public about the “pleasures and advantages of reading electronically”. Essentially it’s an attempt to raise the profile of ebooks and get sceptics to give them a try.
During this …
ebooks aren’t the same as traditional books. There are some things they don’t do as well – and some things they do better. Part of the challenge for the epublishing industry is to find useful ways of exploiting the advantages of the digital format.
Now publisher Macmillan has come up with an interesting idea it calls …
When Apple announced the launch of its new iPad tablet it also announced support for the ePub standard. No mention was made at the time of any DRM (digital restriction management) software; ePub supports DRM but doesn’t mandate any particular system.
Now rumours are surfacing that Apple iBooks will indeed allow publishers to impose DRM on …
The British Library has a treat in store for Kindle owners who also love real books: some 65,000 19th century books are to be made available on the Kindle as facsimiles of the originals. For free.
Many of these books are already available to view online using the Library’s “Turning the Pages” virtual books system. Now …
Until very recently the standard price for a Kindle version of new hardback fiction release was $9.99. That’s set to change following a well-publicised spat between Amazon and publishers Macmillan who wanted the right to set their own prices. Amazon had no choice but to agree to Macmillan’s terms. Now it seems that other …
Amazon has announced that it will be increasing the royalty paid to authors on sales of ebooks for its Kindle reader. Under the new scheme eligible authors will receive a whopping 70% of the digital list price (after “delivery costs” of about 6c per book).
That’s clearly good news for writers and a much better royalty …