September 21, 2016 at 11:36 am
Google today is launching a new feature for Google Books which aims to offer a better challenge to Amazon’s Kindle app when it comes to helping you find new things to read. Called “Discover,” this new section in the Google Books application will help point users to new content, including both personalized suggestions as well as…
May 27, 2016 at 2:10 pm
Welcome to Strata, a new digital storytelling project by the versatile comics illustrator and designer Tommy Lee Edwards and the synth act I Speak Machine, produced by independent label Lex Records in partnership with Penguin Random House (PRH) UK and Google’s Editions At Play, on the homepage of which, the link to Strata calls it, “The book…
May 6, 2016 at 2:31 pm
The next time someone throws you shade for pulling out a steamy romance novel on the train or bus, just tell them that it's okay, because Google's doing it, too. For the past few months, Google has been feeding 2,865 romance novels into an artificial intelligence engine to help loosen it up — linguistically at…
April 19, 2016 at 2:16 pm
The US Supreme Court has ruled in favour of Google in its 11-year legal battle with an authors group. The Court said it would not hear an appeal from the Authors Guild, which claimed Google breached copyright laws by scanning books without permission. The technology giant began the process in 2004, so it could include…
March 4, 2016 at 2:51 pm
Technology that would bring the experience of reading a book into the 21st century—and not by replacing the book with a computer—was patented today by Google, according to filings posted today at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The technology outfits a physical book with numerous page sensors, touch sensors, and motion sensors to understand…
February 18, 2016 at 2:18 pm
Back in 2013, Google launched Play for Education, a program that made it easier for educators to purchase apps and books and distribute them to their students’ Android tablets. Now, this program is coming to an end. As first reported by CRN and also confirmed by us today, Google will stop selling Play for Education…
January 19, 2016 at 3:05 pm
On Friday the ebook subscription service Oyster released the final update to its app for iPad and iPhone, and used that update to quietly announce that it was shutting down. The three-year-old startup was acquired by Google last September, and had promised to remain open into spring 2016 as the staff transitioned over to Google.…
January 6, 2016 at 2:01 pm
The Authors Guild’s decade-long legal battle with Google reached the U.S. Supreme Court last Thursday, as the professional organization asked the court to settle whether or not book digitization represents “copyright infringement on an epic scale.” The appeal does not mean the Supreme Court will hear the case and issue a broad ruling on copyright,…
January 4, 2016 at 12:30 pm
The Authors Guild has officially asked the Supreme Court to hear its case against Google — a long-running dispute over whether copyright law allows for Google to scan and post excerpts from books for its Google Books service. The group filed a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court Thursday. Google's free service allows users…
December 29, 2015 at 12:53 pm
Every day, the company BookBub.com sends out more than 7 million emails pointing consumers to ebooks that cost as little as 99 cents each and free titles as well. A host of big and independent publishers list titles there, including New York-based Kensington Publishing Corp. The idea is to entice readers with a bargain, so…
