Apple

When I reported the speculation yesterday that Diesel eBooks might be shutting down in 5 days, I was hoping that I had gotten the story wrong. Sadly, that's not the case.

I have just received official notice from Diesel eBooks that they are turning off the lights at the end of March. It basically said the same thing as the message on the support page:

Square Enix is partnering with publisher Hachnette Book Group's graphic novel arm Yen Press to internationally distribute English language versions of the former company's manga properties in ebook form, the companies announced today.

The initiative will launch on April 8 and grant readers access to 175 ebook titles through Amazon, the Apple App Store, Barnes and Noble, Google and Kobo. New volumes in these series will be available through these services as they are released in the future.

Customers who bought agency-priced ebooks between 2010 and 2012 are receiving credits for those books as a result of the publishers' settlements with the states. Kindle customers appear to be the first to get those credits.

Book publishers, as part of a price-fixing settlement with state governments, agreed to pay small credits to consumers who bought eligible ebooks between 2010 and 2013. Those credits started showing up in Kindle customers’ accounts Tuesday. Barnes & Noble also says credits will start showing up for Nook customers today.

The hotly debated topic "The future of eBooks: the impact of the digital eBook phenomenon" will be the key focus at this year's South African Book Fair, where the impact of eBooks in the South African education system will come under the spotlight.

Riaan Jonck, CEO of Pearson South Africa, a leading supplier of educational materials and technologies to the student and educator market (and a main exhibitor at this year's Fair) believes that for the next five years print

The Audiobook Creation Exchange, or ACX, is already having a significant effect on the manner in which the industry does business, largely by offering publishers both large and small easier access to the means of production.

What was the first ebook? Debate rages ... When Peter James published his thriller Host on two floppy disks, in 1993, it was billed as the "world's first electronic novel", and attacked as a harbinger of the apocalypse which would destroy literature as we knew it. Now it has been accepted into the Science Museum's collection as one of the earliest examples of the form, as the spotlight of academia begins to shine on the history of digital publishing.

The questions over what the industry can do, or not do about Amazon's dominance, were raised yet again last week. It was first sparked first by Barnes and Noble's declining interest and funding of its Nook venture, then we had Sony shutting up it US store and handing the keys to Kobo as it battles with many greater corporate issues, then came Kobo itself filing objections to a Competition Bureau agreement impelling four of the biggest publishers operating in Canada to renegotiate their contracts with ebook retailers

I don't know how much weight friends of the court carry in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. But the pro-Apple (AAPL) amici curiae brief filed Wednesday by two economists lays out clearly -- more clearly perhaps than Apple's own trial lawyers -- the economic and legal issues the company tried and failed to get across to Judge Denise Cote last June. (See The view from the hard benches.)

The publishing industry is not one of the overachievers in terms of its use of big data. And since my book on big data-Big Data @ Work-is out, I thought it might be fun to speculate on what big data will do to the business of publishing books. The goal of any publisher is to get its content bought and read. In the past, publishers could know only if their books and magazines were bought, and knowing even that was problematic.

The iOS app for Kobo Books has been updated, adding in support for built-in media such graphics and video. The update brings the app up to version 7.1. The company's last update for Kobo Books was released January 9th and involved iOS 7 support.

Kobo is based in Toronto and is part of the Japanese company Rakutan. More than a year ago Kobo acquired Aquafadas, the digital publishing solutions company based in Montpellier, France. Quite a number of publishers remain hopeful that Kobo