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US online giant Amazon will start a Japanese-language ebook business as early as this year, the Nikkei business daily and Jiji press said Thursday. The company, which already has a strong retail presence in Japan, is in the final stages of talks with major Japanese publishers, the Nikkei said.
The launch of iCloud this week introduced a new phase of cloud computing: the battle for dominance of the consumer cloud. iCloud is a comprehensive service that puts most (eventually all?) of your data in a personal cloud that syncs across your desktop and mobile devices and archives in the cloud. In best Apple fashion, it requires (or allows) almost no set-up.
More than half of people working in the industry think sales of e-books will overtake those of their printed counterparts by the end of this decade. That is among the early findings from The Digital Census 2011, The Bookseller’s annual survey of digital trends and opinions.
At FutureBook, “namenick” has a post explaining why he sees Kobo as being much better-suited than Amazon or Apple for international expansion. In short, Kobo has much better international content availability. Where Amazon has been opening separate stores for various different countries and languages (most recently a French store), Kobo makes all content for all languages available from the same store.
Princeton University Press appears to be the first university press to join the e-singles game. On November 9, the press will launch Princeton Shorts, a series of nonfiction e-singles consisting of selections from previously published books.
Hearst hopes that its snack-size Good Housekeeping “mini cookbooks,” which it is selling for $0.99 on Apple and Nook, will entice readers to purchase more expensive e-cookbooks. In addition to cookbooks, the company, which publishes Cosmopolitan, also partnered with Open Road to publish “Cosmo’s Sexiest Stories Ever,” a $0.99 collection of three stories by bestselling women’s authors. All of the e-singles hit iBookstore bestseller lists.
The August class action lawsuit filed against five major book publishers and Apple, accusing them of colluding to jack up the price of e-books in an effort to wrest back pricing power from Amazon, was simply the opening act. It has now ballooned into more than a dozen lawsuits, and dragged Amazon and Barnes & Noble into the mix.
There's a case to be made that Amazon's new browser is more important than its tablet. The second-day stories on Amazon's Fire tablet have started to zero in on the implications of a less-heralded—and more unexpected—announcement: The special-purpose browser Amazon's software engineers have designed to speed up Web searches on their new mobile device.
Amazon.com today unveiled its long-awaited color tablet, the Amazon Kindle Fire, at an event in New York that also saw the introduction of two new e-readers.
What if there was a way to raise money for the book you want to write without having to have a publisher? Jim Kukral did just that.
