Author Topic: The E-Book Files  (Read 169794 times)

Offline MaineWriter

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Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #20 on: July 31, 2008, 07:06:34 pm »
more from James:

Newbie Kindle reactions (cont)

27 Jul 2008 07:26 am

1) Whole different way of thinking about buying books:

Sitting on the airplane at Newark airport Friday afternoon, getting ready for the 13-hour flight to Beijing. People are still trudging aboard, still OK to talk on the phone, chatting with a friend who mentions a great new book he's sure I'll want to read. While talking with him, I take out the Kindle that I got three days earlier, search the Kindle online store, find and buy the book, have it delivered to the Kindle to read during the flight -- all within about two minutes total. Huge reduction in the gap between "thought that a book might be interesting" and "paying money for that book." Works only for books in the Kindle catalogue, of course.  Implications not so good for book stores but positive for the overall industry of selling ideas  / thoughts / writing, I would think.

2)  And about not buying books:

Giant supply of books for free download, in Kindle and other eBook formats, here and here, among other sites. They're mainly out-of-copyright classics, from Ulysses to War and Peace to Huckleberry Finn to Persuasion to Looking Backward to The Oregon Trail to Anne of Green Gables to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (and many by PG Wodehouse). Plus a few new ones. Small donations solicited here. In most cases you download to your computer and transfer to Kindle via USB cable, which is extremely easy.

3) And about the process of reading:

Spent six or seven hours of the flight reading on the Kindle. Perfectly pleasant and legible. Only one inconvenience relative to " real" books -- harder to flip ahead or back several pages at a time. (You scroll page by page, or else go to the table of contents.) And a kind of mental-picture adjustment: it's easier to insert bookmarks or placeholders, or seach for a specific word in the text; harder to have a remembered visual image of a certain passage as it fits on a certain place on a page. Not good for books where pictures, illustrations, maps, production quality matter a lot. Very, very good for reading Word .DOC files or .PDFs that I would otherwise have to read on the computer.

My theory: television didn't eliminate radio, telephones didn't eliminate personal conversations, eBooks won't eliminate real books. People always find more ways to communicate, and this will be another way. Very good for some kinds of information, not so much for others. A welcome new addition to the mix. 

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/newbie_kindle_reactions_cont.php
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Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #21 on: August 08, 2008, 09:49:01 am »
From Princeton University:


Princeton University Press joins the Kindle age with ‘The Subprime Solution.’

By Adam Grybowski
Posted: Wednesday, August 6, 2008 11:53 AM EDT

ON Aug. 15 Princeton University Press will release, two weeks ahead of its print publication, its first Kindle e-book, Robert Shiller’s The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press, 2008). The Kindle is Amazon’s e-book reader, released with fanfare last November.

   The subprime mortgage crisis that is currently dragging the U.S. economy into a possible recession will certainly inspire economists to spill a lot of ink debating its cause and possible solutions. With the Kindle, readers can experience Mr. Shiller’s take on it — no ink, paper or binding necessary.

   Amazon spent three years developing the Kindle. The wireless device uses an electronic-paper display technology that may provide the closest experience to reading on real paper yet developed. It weighs 10.3 ounces and holds more than 200 titles, including newspapers, magazines and blogs, as well as access to Wikipedia and a dictionary. Users don’t have to locate a hotspot to buy and download media. The Kindle’s wireless connectivity uses the same network technology of advanced cell phones, not WiFi.

   ”Personally, I think this is the best we’ve seen, for an e-book reader,” says Priscilla Treadwell, electronic publications marketing manager for PU Press. “It’s a lot easier to use, the text is more eye-friendly, you can put 200 books on it, and you can download books in your living room.”

   Back in the early 2000s, when the e-book market was beginning to develop, PU Press “decided to test the waters,” Ms. Treadwell says. They digitized about 300 titles and made them available for sale in the early e-book formats for Microsoft Reader, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and Palm handheld devices. Despite the introduction of the Sony Reader Digital Book, which was supposed to be an evolutionary step for the industry, e-books have failed to dent the market for traditionally printed books.

   Amazon promotes the Kindle as a revolutionary product for the reading public, and PU Press is responding.
   ”We’re taking a big step back into this, now that the market has matured and it’s a lot clearer what’s likely to be successful,” Ms. Treadwell says. “University presses are seeing it as an important market to be in. More and more people expect information to be available online or in digital format.”

   The Subprime Solution will be followed by From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton University Press, 1999) by Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International. Mr. Zakaria’s latest book, The Post-American World (W. W. Norton, 2008), which examines the rise of China and India, has been a best seller since its May release.

   After that, Princeton University Press is planning to release about 400 backlist titles for digital distribution. And beginning in the fall, frontlist titles will regularly receive digital releases alongside the traditional print format.

   About a year ago, PU Press began working on a contract to distribute its books electronically with Amazon. As for choosing Mr. Shiller’s new book as its first Kindle release, “It was a bit serendipitous,” Ms. Treadwell says. “It’s a timely topic, as we all know, and I like the fact that the title says ‘solution,’ and not ‘disaster.’”

   In The Subprime Solution, Mr. Shiller, a Yale economics professor, examines the origins of the subprime crisis and outlines a response to solve it. He is also the author of Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2000), a New York Times best seller that sold nearly 100,000 copies. In that book Mr. Shiller predicted the stock market crash that happened just one month after its publication.

   Though the majority of books PU Press publishes are specialized or academic, it is introducing e-books to consumers before focusing on the university demographic. A device like the Kindle that can hold so much information seems ideal for students, who are required to read so much material at once. PU Press is developing ways to deliver textbooks on different, nontraditional platforms, and the Kindle will likely be one of them.

   Not all books are available electronically. “You can’t assume any book on Amazon will be available in a digital version,” Ms. Treadwell says. First, they have to acquire rights, and that can be tricky when dealing with the likes of university presses that publish a great variety of art books. While a press may have the rights for the print edition, which is standard, they may not have the rights for the digital edition. The language of contract agreements may be catching up to a new modern publishing reality, but problems with rights for backlisted titles will likely persist.

The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It by Robert Shiller will be released in electronic format Aug. 15. It will be available in print Sept. 1; (609) 258-3897; www.press.princeton.edu; For information about the Kindle, visit www.amazon.com
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Offline MaineWriter

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Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #22 on: August 14, 2008, 07:40:40 am »
From the New York Times:

 August 12, 2008,  3:38 pm
The Lessons From the Kindle’s Success

By Saul Hansell

It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.

Amazon hasn’t confirmed these numbers, but the e-commerce giant has said that of the 150,000 titles it now sells for the Kindle as well as in paper, more than 10 percent of the sales are in Kindle format.

Anecdotally, I know several people who are absolutely gaga for the Kindle. They happen to be exactly the sort of people for whom Amazon said it had designed the device: heavy readers who want an easy way to carry several books around with them. These Kindle fans are also delighted by how easy it is to shop for and download books onto the device using Amazon’s wireless store.

I think there are a few lessons from this. First you can’t underestimate the miracle that happens when you make something really easy for people. Easy means fast, better than the old way and with very few annoying disappointments and delays. The Kindle device is a better way to carry lots of books (at least for some). Shopping is easy, with very few steps. And Amazon’s relationship with publishers has created a very broad library of Kindle books. Sure, there are lots of books you can’t buy for it, but the disappointment factor is low.

The second lesson is, to quote a cliché, it takes all kinds. Steve Jobs dismissed the e-book market because “people don’t read anymore.” That may be true broadly, but there could well be a $1 billion business for Amazon serving the tiny share of people who read a lot.

It will be interesting to see what lessons Amazon takes from this. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, can be proud that he identified an audience and created an innovative product that served it. But will he feel victim to the temptation to believe that the Kindle is the only right answer and refuse to offer e-books for other devices?

I think that when it comes to the size and shape of devices, we are moving into an era where there will be many more choices that will increasingly be based on personal taste. People choose writing pads of all sorts, from big yellow legal pads to those little bound notebooks with graph paper. In the same way, we are going to have very personal choices about what sort of connected computer we want to use for communicating, reading, working and so on.

For some, the Kindle may be the ideal shape for reading books. The E-Ink screen has great battery life and can be read outside.

For others — me, for example — software to read Kindle books on an iPhone would be great. (I’ve become quite fond of reading news on my iPhone. The screen is the width of a column of type, I can hold it in one hand, and I like moving through a page by scrolling the touch screen with my thumb. The battery life, however, is worse than awful.)

Others may want to read books on laptops, BlackBerries, Chumbys and who knows what else. It would be a mistake to assume everyone wants to read the same way.
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Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #23 on: August 14, 2008, 07:46:39 am »
And this week's ebook recommendation: Society's Child by Janis Ian. This is a wonderful autobiography from the woman most of us probably remember as the singer/songwriter of Society's Child and At Seventeen. She's done alot of other stuff, too, and had quite the life over the past forty years. The book is entertaining, well-written and I flew right through it.

At the other end of the spectrum: Sandals and Sodomy by a variety of authors. It caught my eye because one of the stories was by Connie Bailey, who many here might remember as a very prolific fanfic author. I was curious if it was the same Connie and I am sure it is. Anyway, of the six stories, I enjoyed (in this order): Greeks Bearing Gifts, The Vow, and After the Games (this is Connie's story). Undefeated Love was dull; Hadrian fell into the "porn without plot" category, and I couldn't even finish Troy Cycle. So, if anyone is looking for a little Greek smut, check this out. LOL.

L
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Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #24 on: September 16, 2008, 05:41:27 am »
I am traveling, so I have had a chance to do a bit more reading on the plane and so on...

First up, Soul by Tobsha Learner. Overall a good book but unfortunately, it fell down at the end. I almost felt like the author got tired of writing it, or had written herself into enough of a corner that she could figure out how to get out. Still, I enjoyed it. There is a gay romance in the story but I don't think the author could bring herself to write a sex scene (although she did fine with the het sex!).

This is a link to the paperback, it is also available in e-book format:

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-Tobsha-Learner/dp/076532010X/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221557479&sr=8-2

Then I read Razor Burn by Scott & Scott (the Romentics). This is another easy read, very fast, sort of silly and improbable in parts but it kept me entertained. There are sections where they desperately could have used an editor but at least it is not full of typos! Again, this is the amazon link but it is available as an ebook:

http://www.amazon.com/Razor-Burn-Romentics-Novel-Novels/dp/1594570345/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221557724&sr=8-2

Now I am reading Speak Its Name a series of three short novellas by Charlie Cochrane, Lee Rowan and Erastes. I have finished the first two and am looking forward to the third. The review by Elsa Rolle from Italy (on amazon) sums up my feelings nicely:

http://www.amazon.com/Trilogy-No-111-Speak-Name/dp/B001BXWM7E/ref=ed_oe_k

Enjoy, everyone!

Leslie
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Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #25 on: September 16, 2008, 05:44:26 am »
I am really excited to announce the publication of L. A. Mischief, sequel to L. A. Heat.




If you have already read L. A. Heat by author P. A. Brown, you have met David Eric Laine and Christopher Bellamere. If not, get ready to make their acquaintance in L. A. Mischief, a fast-paced novella that details the early months of their relationship. David a LAPD Homicide Detective is stubborn, proud, and barely out of the closet. As the story opens, he is struggling to find the balance between his intense feelings for Chris, the urges of his newly liberated libido, and the demands of a job where bodies pop up on an all too regular basis. Chris blonde, smart, out and proud faces his own set of challenges, including helping his best friend cope with his ongoing grief after the brutal murder of his lover. Life events conspire to bring David and Chris together while at the same time keeping them apart will they be able to push their way through and find a common ground for happiness and their shared love?

It received a 5 star review at Amazon! Yahoo!

Links to purchase the ebook can be found here:

http://www.bcpinepress.com/htdocs/whatsnew.html

Leslie
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Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #26 on: September 16, 2008, 05:47:06 am »
And more exciting news...A Love Born From Steel

http://www.bcpinepress.com/htdocs/upcomingreleases.html

First sneak peak at the cover at the Bristlecone Pine Press website!

Leslie
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Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #27 on: September 17, 2008, 04:04:45 pm »
If anyone was thinking about reading Fatal Encryption but wasn't really sure, maybe this will help you make up your mind. Check it out!

http://kindlereader.blogspot.com/2008/09/kindle-book-du-jour-fatal-encryption-by.html

Leslie
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Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #28 on: September 28, 2008, 08:56:38 am »
This week's recommendation: Death of a Pirate King by Josh Lanyon. This is Josh's fourth Adrien English story and I think it is his best. I read the whole thing while flying home on the plane from Germany. It is great!

http://www.loose-id.com/detail.aspx?ID=767

It is also available as a paperback:

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Pirate-King-Josh-Lanyon/dp/1934531316/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222606535&sr=8-1

Enjoy!

L
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Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #29 on: October 11, 2008, 08:55:54 am »
Some interesting statistics...

http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/story/story.bsp?sid=176055&var=story
Book Business
AAP Releases August Sales Figures


Book sales tracked by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for the month of August increased 0.6 percent to $1.5 billion, compared to August 2007. Calendar year-to-date sales were down 1.4 percent.

Categories posting an increase in August included:

•E-books sales jumped up by 82.9 percent for the month ($4.3 million), and the category also posted a 52-percent increase for the year.

•The children’s/young-adult paperback category increased 18.4 percent in August with sales totaling $69.4 million, reflecting an increase of 14.1 percent for the year.

•The adult-hardcover category increased 9.2 percent in August with sales of $100.9 million; year-to-date sales decreased 3.6 percent.

•Sales in the professional and scholarly category increased three percent in August ($99.8 million), but decreased one percent for the year.

•Adult-paperback sales increased 1.8 percent for the month ($147.4 million) and increased by 9.5 percent for the year.

•Higher-education publishing sales increased by 0.6 percent for the month ($826.0 million) and increased 3.2 percent for the year.

Categories posting a decrease in August included:

•Sales of university-press hardcover books dropped 17.8 percent in August with sales of $6.4 million; sales decreased by 6.4 percent for the year.

•The net elementary/high school basal and supplemental K-12 category posted a decrease of 16.6 percent in August with sales of $741.5 million; the category decreased 1.7 percent for the year.

•University-press paperback sales also posted a decrease of 13.9 percent for the month, with sales totaling $9.8 million; sales were down 7.6 percent for the year.

•Religious books decreased 10.8 percent for the month with sales totaling $61.1 million; sales were down by 7.7 percent for the year.

•The children’s/young-adult hardcover category decreased 9.3 percent for the month with sales of $96.4 million; sales for year-to-date dropped 35.5 percent.

•Audiobook sales posted a 6.9-percent decrease in August, with sales totaling $11.9 million; sales for the year decreased 26.8 percent.

•The adult mass-market category decreased 4.5 percent for August with sales totaling $70.1 million; sales increased 2.1 percent year-to-date.
« Last Edit: October 28, 2008, 08:29:58 am by Maine That One Writer »
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