Ebooks News & Articles

 Amazon posted its earnings last night with sales up 22% on the quarter. But the key trend highlighted is the massive move to digital reading and consumption on Kindle devices, with physical book sales at their slowest growth since Amazon's founding. 

 Having got off to a roaring start, its all been rather quiet on the Kindle Fire front recently. Amazon seems to be making moves with word that the Europe might get it to boost sales, while America may get a new higher-spec version to revitalise interest.

As expected, Apple's education event at the Guggenheim Museum brought forth new ways for students to read their classic texts in interactive, digital form. As usual, Apple also brought its own magic design skills to shake up the market with a new iBooks 2 and iBooks Author to help create a world of educational content.

Apple's Thursday event won't be a show-stopper in the usual iDevice sense, but early chatter suggests that the company may be about to revolutionize ebook creation. It could achieve this by launching a Garageband-like app to bring content-rich, Web-enabled, digital book creation tools to everyone.

The holiday season is nearing, and gadget-makers are scrambling to be in the lead in terms of sales and market share. Just as Amazon is promising to announce its new Kindle this week, Barnes & Noble is reportedly planning the launch of new Nook Color Android tablets priced at $349.

In my last post, I talked about some of the ways that the iPad and social business software (SBS) both had tremendous opportunities to outflank Microsoft's dominance in the desktop document creation and document management space, respectively. Based on the responses to the article, it seems like lots of folks out there are wondering the same things about Microsoft's ability to maintain their dominance in these areas.

But, like any consultant worth their salt, I like to have it both ways, so in this post I want to consider the very real ways that Apple and SBS vendors could fail in their attempts to knock Microsoft out of the game, because their long-term success is far from assured.

As e-reader sales race ahead of those jumped-up, overpriced, tablets, led by Amazon's (news, site) Kindle, does America just want a really good read? And will the release of the Star Wars novels give them an even bigger boost? 

Amazon (news, site) has trumpeted the fact that, less than four years after introducing Kindle books, its customers are now purchasing more Kindle books than all print books -- hardcover and paperback -- combined. However, it's important not to take this announcement at face value.

Google started the new year with a new purchase of a small and relatively unknown company, eBook Technologies. The new purchase only fueled rumors of Google's plans to expand on the ebook market.

Here's an all-new level of geekery: Now you can purchase O'Reilly and Microsoft Press Books from the Apple iBookstore. Download the iBooks app to your iPad, iPod touch or iPhone, and you've got a massive searchable reference pool on the go. 

Are you a high or mid-level book publishing professional? Got something to say about eBooks and digital publishing? If so, CMSWire encourages you to participate in a “blueprint” survey from the Gilbane Group.

As long as there’s been an Internet, the discussion between user experience and usability has been explored. Although they are conceptually linked, taken separately, they highlight different elements of the human-computer interaction.

Yet in these days of advanced user interfaces, from mobile devices to e-readers to tablets, has the line between user experience and usability blurred? And if so, what does it mean for web standards and design? We examine their distinctions, roles and implications in an effort to answer these questions.

As we await the official announcement of the Apple tablet, the silence and unanswered questions has given us time to ponder the ways that the Apple tablet may impact the future of ePublishing.

Attention PacktPub.com account holders! In December 2008 the company decided to enable the copy and paste feature on their eBooks. That announcement spawned loads of requests for the removal of password protection as well, and in this case, the little guy’s voice was actually heard. After considering the increasing popularity of reading books on portable services, PacktPub took the advice of their customers and announced the immediate removal of all password protection from their eBooks earlier this week.

The bad annoying news: If you own a Packt eBook, you’ll have to download it again from your account to get rid of the password protection.

With a ton of aim to please, PacktPub is not only listening to their customers, but giving them cool stuff as well. Their site is currently offering 30% off of all their eBooks for the duration of March, and has also released a free download called Building Websites with Plone by Cameron Cooper. Originally published in 2004, Cooper's book quickly became a definitive book on the Zope-based content management system. 

For more details regarding Cooper's book, other free books and discounts or if you have any additional suggestions you'd like to offer up, just visit Packt's site. 

A former exec at Apple has just released a very short, very free ebook on marketing like Apple. It’s called Marketing Apple.

Why is this relevant to you? Glad you asked.