Apple

You won't see Adolf Hitler peering back at you from the featured display tables at Barnes & Noble any time soon. But browse the most popular e-book stores these days and Der Führer's mug is seemingly unavoidable. For a year now, his magnum manifesto has loomed large over current best-sellers on iTunes, where at the time of this writing two different digital versions of Mein Kampf rank 12th and 15th on the Politics & Current Events chart alongside books by modern conservative powerhouses like Sarah Palin, Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck.

On behalf of all employees at Smashwords, I want to start by thanking every Smashwords author, publisher and agent that publishes and distributes with Smashwords.  We serve at your pleasure and we appreciate your trust, partnership and support. 

I also want to thank the retailers and library aggregators that comprise the Smashwords distribution network.  Every day, you work tirelessly and often without adequate recognition for the amazing service you provide our authors and publishers.  You receive, ingest and merchandise our books to your customers.

A bitter battle between Apple Inc and a lawyer appointed to monitor its compliance with a court antitrust ruling escalated on Monday, as the U.S. government and the monitor both hit back at Apple. Over the last two months, Apple has launched a broad legal attack on the monitor, Michael Bromwich, who was appointed by a federal judge after a ruling that the company conspired to fix e-book prices.

In a big year for e-books, two behemoths went to court while new services and companies emerged. Apple faced allegations over e-book pricing, calling into question the prices of e-books in general. Amazon went to court over access to e-books but saw its case tossed. New services from Amazon and streaming e-book companies emerged in the market, while Nook still declines. The access of e-books in libraries increased while the Digital Millennium Copyright Act limited access for people with disabilities.

This year is the year I fell head over heels for audiobooks. There's no way I won't always think of this year that way. It's the year I spent seven and a half hours on the road to and from work each week listening to other people read to me in my car. And when that stopped being enough, I squirreled away extra minutes listening while knitting, doing yard work, restoring old furniture, shopping for groceries, riding my bike.

Amazon's strategy with its Kindle e-readers and tablets has always been pretty clear: bring in more customers, even at a loss, so long as they partake of the online retailer's panoply of services, from e-books to streaming movies. Unlike rival Apple, which sells its devices at a premium, Amazon has seemed more or less happy to break even or lose money on its devices. Now, a report based on research by Consumer Intelligent Research Partners (CIRP) shows how shrewd that strategy may be.

Despite perceptions that the publishing business is troubled, or even facing the same tumult of the music business, the CEO of HarperCollins said that the growth in digital book sales were improving margins and even royalty rates for authors, and even creating ways to test variable pricing for e-books once they are released.

At the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference on Wednesday, HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray said that the industry was "not going the way of the music business," with digital publishing translating into greater consumption of books purchased, he noted.

Diana Dawson has over the years bought her twin children digital cameras, e-book readers and media players as Christmas presents. This holiday season, she's covering those bases with one device: a tablet computer.

"They do it all," Dawson said outside an Apple Inc. store in Walnut Creek, California, after buying iPads for her now 27-year-old daughters.

Dawson’s purchasing underscores the changes roiling the consumer-electronics market. While the industry once benefited from year-end sales in categories from cameras to printers to desktop personal computers, this holiday period brings the clearest signs yet that

A federal judge in New York threw out claims by independent bookstores that Amazon and the big publishing houses conspired to create a monopoly by using technical measures to ensure that ebooks bought on Amazon could only be read on Kindle devices and apps.

In a ruling published on Monday, US District Judge Jed Rakoff rejected the notion that Amazon's "device specific DRM" (digital rights management) provided any benefit to the publishers and described the bookstores' claim as "threadbare."

It's the holiday season and present-buying, non-profit donating and general money-spending are in full swing. Likewise, kickstarters and other crowdfunding campaigns are asking for a bit of support this holiday season to publish new books that authors and presses can't release without The People's buy-in.

Crowdfunding is nothing new. With LeanPub, PubSlush, and the recently crowdfunded publishing company Unbound, crowdfunding has officially broken into the publishing world. Even large publishers like Macmillan have created their own platforms in order to gain feedback on possible future releases, like Swoon Reads.