Sony

Ebook pricing strategies are changing rapidly as the digital market grows. Self-published authors continue to shake things up, but what might have been best practice a couple of years ago is not necessarily relevant in 2013 — and as retailers amass more data and publishers experiment, there’s a new set of tips for publishers and authors to pay attention to.

Are ebook prices falling? Sometimes…

“Pricing for us is a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute discipline,” Michael Tamblyn, Kobo’s chief content officer, said in an IDPF panel at BookExpo America on Thursday. Year on year, Kobo sees an eight percent decline in the

When the former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman cofounded Open Road Media in 2009, the publisher was one of the first of its kind: The idea was that it would mine the backlist for books that had never been available as ebooks, snap up the digital rights and publish the ebooks for the first time, thus introducing authors like William Styron and Alice Walker to new audiences.

Nearly four years and 3,000 titles later (with an additional 1,000 titles under contract), the company is still focused around acquiring and marketing backlist titles.

Amazon offers a range of hardware, including its Kindle e-readers and tablets, but now it’s looking to expand the line with two new smartphones and an audio-only device that streams music, according to the Wall Street Journal. The phones include a high-end one with a glasses-free 3D screen, as well as another about which details were not included in the report, which presumably would be a more traditional design.

Amazon has been rumored to have been working on a phone for a while now,

1DollarScan, an innovative service offering the world’s most affordable and advanced book scanning technology, has become the first company in the U.S. to offer a just-announced monthly membership program for book and document scanning with a variety of free features with no long-term commitments to the customer.

It's no surprise that there's a lot of confusion around metadata for books. It's complicated. If only they hadn't used the "M" word—metadata. It reeks of digital complexity. And then you read the standard definition: "Metadata is data about data." Gee, thanks. As if your eyes hadn't already glazed over.

What does your e-reader know about you? More than you think, according to a new study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The EFF, a nonprofit group that advocates for consumer rights and privacy, combed through the privacy policies of a number of e-readers and e-book platforms, including Google Books, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, and Indiebound, and found many devices track book searches, monitor what and how readers read downloaded books, record book purchases, and in some cases, even share information without a customer’s consent.

Simba Information’s new report out this week is titled “The iPad and Its Owner 2013.” But given its findings—including that 1 in 5 U.S. adults owns an iPad, along with projections that within five years tablet owners will outnumber print book buyers—it might have been called “The Rise of the Machines.”

Surface. iPad. Nook HD. Kindle Fire HD. iPad Mini. The list goes on and on. Consumers can try to escape the onslaught of new tablets, but they are inescapable.

Apple, Sony, Samsung, Asus, Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Barnes & Noble are among the many companies that have developed at least one tablet. Some of these companies are attempting to expand the market with the so-called tablet hybrids, which take advantage of Windows 8.

Pearson, the British media conglomerate, said Thursday that it was in talks to combine its Penguin publishing house with Random House, owned by Bertelsmann of Germany.

The deal, if completed, would bring together two of the biggest book publishers in the world, uniting Penguin and its iconic orange logo with the owner of Crown Publishing and Knopf Doubleday. The combination would create a division with greater scale that could compete in a rapidly evolving e-book market.

Despite its almost mythical dominance in book retailing, Amazon has struggled mightily to crack the publishing business. While it sells millions of copies of other publishers’ books, Amazon can’t quite seem to get its own books off the ground and onto the bestseller charts, according to a recent Wall Street Journal piece that examined the online retailer’s publishing woes.

Case in point: Penny Marshall’s memoir, “My Mother Was Nuts.”