Sony

Sony's eBook Store will be relaunched Friday, Dec. 11 as the Reader™ Store, available at a new address, readerstore.sony.com

I recently became a follower of Khaled Hosseini, author of “The Kite Runner,” on Twitter. I was shocked to see that he had only 920 followers. Not that 920 is necessarily a small number of followers … but it’s Khaled Hosseini, for heaven’s sake. I started looking for some of my other favorite authors. I couldn’t find Barbara Kingsolver (“The Poisonwood Bible” is one of my all-time favorites) on Twitter, but she did have a Facebook profile with 3,845 fans (now 3,846).

Los Gatos, Calif.-based Smashwords, a publisher and distributor of multiformat e-books, has entered into an e-book distribution agreement with Sony Electronics. Smashwords offers a free e-book publishing platform to authors and publishers that gives them control over pricing, sampling and distribution of their works.

It used to be straightforward. A publisher sent out a catalog of new releases, promoting certain titles to bookstores. Marketing proceeded through fixed channels and seasonal rituals, and, year after year, everyone knew their place in the dance. Not so anymore.

In this issue, we’ve packed content galore on many of the most significant changes facing the industry. In addition to the features on the evolving retail landscape and ways to cut time and cost from production and manufacturing, there are three important articles on e-books.

In a classic, 19th-century short story, Washington Irving’s character Rip Van Winkle wakes up after being asleep for 20 years to find that the world has changed all around him. People he loved, including his wife, are no longer alive, and the country itself has—in the intervening two decades—gone through the massive trauma and upheaval of the Civil War. For Rip Van Winkle, it seems like only a few peaceful hours have passed; all he did was close his eyes. But in what seemed to him a short amount of time, everything around him had irrevocably changed.

"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.”

Common in the history of technology products is the pattern that devices with multiple functions generally take market share from earlier, single-purpose devices. A classic example can be found in word processing: Dedicated word processors, such as those from Wang and IBM, gave way to PCs that could be used for a wide range of applications, among them word processing. Dedicated, wired, e-mail-only devices likewise gave way to the general-purpose PC.

Smashwords Authors and Publishers, Anywhere Around the World, Can Now Publish Directly into The eBook Store from Sony and other Major Ebook Retailers

Sony Corp. announced that it will offer an e-book reader with the capability to wirelessly download e-books, the Associated Press reported. The lack of a wireless feature in previous Sony e-readers often distinguished them from Amazon's Kindle, which always has offered wireless capability. The new Sony e-reader, the Reader Daily Edition, will go on sale by December and retail for $399. The latest version of the Kindle retails for $299.