Mobipocket

Merriam-Webster Adapts to a Mobile World
June 1, 2014 at 7:00 pm

Today the reference industry is undergoing another transformation -- a shift from large desktop screens to small mobile displays. Reference users expect dictionary access on their smartphones and within their ereaders, which has spurred Merriam-Webster's meticulous development of dictionary apps and ebooks.

It’s Official – Diesel eBooks is Shutting Down in Four Days
March 26, 2014

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:

Amazon's Monopoly is not Predatory
July 12, 2013

As I survey the responses to and discussions of the recent decision in the Apple e-book antitrust trial, I’m disheartened by how many people seem to be buying into the publishers’ and Apple’s narrative of Amazon as the evil predatory-pricing monopolist. You see it in comments and articles here and there, that take for granted Amazon has been selling all its e-books at a loss, not just a small handful.

Even Adam Engst of TidBITS has been taken in:
Initially the U.S. Department of Justice filed this lawsuit against

Read Free or Die!
July 1, 2012

John Scalzi won't have to field any tough questions about how digital rights management software (DRM) works at tonight's book signing. The author—out on tour promoting his newest science fiction novel, "Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas"—says those difficult discussions popped up regularly when he engaged with his tech-savvy fan base in the past. But he doesn't expect any of that negative discourse at tonight's Boston-area signing event—or at any of the other scheduled stops on his current campaign to promote the New York Times bestseller.

Inside the E-Book Production Process
January 1, 2012

As the e‑book market evolves, so do publishers' internal processes for producing them. Book Business asked Baker Publishing, Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. and Hacket Publishing Co. to pull back the curtain on how they handle e‑book workflows, from editorial and design through conversion, formatting, proofreading and distribution. The answers are varied, but all demonstrate an ability to make the best use of existing internal talent while strategically investing in additional or outside resources to create e‑books expertly and efficiently.

Stop Treating $9.99 As The Magic E-Book Price
December 16, 2011

$9.99 is often treated as a magic price—the cost of a New York Times bestseller on Kindle back in the good old days, before big-six publishers adopted agency pricing models and ended Amazon’s discounting of their books. However, for a variety of reasons, few readers ever had the chance to buy those $9.99 e-books—in large part because e-readers themselves were so expensive. From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal : When Amazon.com Inc. introduced its first Kindle e-reader back in November 2007, the $9.99 digital best seller was a key selling point. Today, the price of a

Are We on the Verge of an E-book Explosion?
October 1, 2009

"The market for digital books … has been roughly doubling every 18 months,” says Andrew Savikas, O’Reilly Media’s vice president of digital initiatives. “Follow that line out, and in less than a decade it’s 64 times the size it is now.”

Gene Therapy: Embracing E-books
October 1, 2008

As Steve Potash, CEO of Overdrive and president of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), said last spring at IDPF’s annual meeting: The world of digital books is expanding, and there is a steady flow of major publishers and technology providers adopting the .epub standard. What we’re going through now is a ramping-up stage during which it can’t be either/or—nobody is saying that we will accept or deliver only in .epub. Accepting only .epub formats is likely to be the first move that’s made, because the advantage to publishers is that they will have only one electronic book version with one ISBN of which