Wed August 14 2013
'50 Shades Of Grey' author nails down top spot of top earners |
03:47 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News E L James, the author of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, has just topped Forbes' list of top-selling authors. She raked in $95 million from sales of her kinky erotic trilogy, which sold more than 70 million copies in 2012.
I read this story, and I feel a sense of deja vu... where I have read about this….. ah, I know, right here. So it's true: sex sells. Anyhow, here's the list of Forbes' top-earning authors, with some of their best-selling novels: 1. E.L. James, "50 Shades of Grey" — $95 million |
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Kindle store: Indies avoid DRM to reach wider audience |
03:40 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News Bufo Calvin from the I Love My Kindle blog analyzed the currently top 100 selling e-books in the Kindle store and made an interesting observation:
An increasing number of e-book vendors have discovered the added value in selling books DRM-free. Perhaps all it would take is one big vendor - Amazon perhaps? - to decide to go DRM-free to make DRM go away for all and forever. |
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Tue August 13 2013
Anti-piracy group wants to catch e-book pirates; vendors now required to help them |
07:32 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News TorrentFreak has published a report stating that Dutch vendors who sell watermarked e-books are now required to share identifying information of suspected pirates with the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN.
Digital watermarks are one of the technologies being touted as a means to deter piracy of digital content. The issue with watermarks is that they're subject to abuses that could invade an innocent consumer's privacy or, worse, expose him to lawsuits for infringements he did not commit. In a blog entry, Kurt Roeckx, who runs the Dutch speaking e-book store E-webshops, shares his doubt about the legality of working hand in hand with the anti-piracy group.
You can read his full blog entry here. Image: peasap/Flickr |
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ezPDF Reader 50% off (iOS and Android) |
10:47 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management PDF files are everywhere, and there are quite a number of apps that are designed to make it easy to read and annotate them on your mobile devices. ezPDF Reader does an admirable job in this regard (*), and it's currently having a back-to-school deal which nabs a 50% discount off the regular price. (*) ratings look somewhat more favorable for the Android edition than for iOS. |
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Kindle for Android 4.2.0 released |
03:13 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Readers | Android Devices Time to snag a few more features with Amazon's Kindle for Android app. The latest update delivers two notable additions. First, you have more options for sorting the items in your library, and second, you can now display the time left to finish reading the current chapter or the entire book. What's New:
Get your download on at the source link here. |
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The End of the Small Screen? |
02:39 AM by 6charlong in E-Book General | General Discussions First, a word of apology. You see Ray Bradbury’s works finally came out in eBook format, that’s One. Two, Amazon, and only Amazon, had an “Opening Day” sort of sale on Ray Bradbury books: $1.99. Obviously since all I have this week is $2.39, my problem was: which one. (I bought Something Wicked This Way Comes.) But the point of this post is that having bought it at Amazon I didn’t have it on my Kobo Aura, and when I opened up the Paperwhite to download my new book I received an almost palpable shock. I had set my beloved Aura aside for what? Apparently I’d forgotten how small a six-inch screen actually is. Was it worth saving $4 and change to read a favored book on this cramped screen? Then I realized that the race is on. Surely Amazon has to answer the Aura’s challenge. They always announce the next model in late summer, so it should be soon. I think they will have to offer a bigger eInk screen, something that can even display newspaper pages for example--something with better formatting. Now I can’t wait to discover what Amazon will do. |
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Mon August 12 2013
The Kindle ecosystem - how big is it really? Analyst takes a guess. |
04:21 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News It's not a secret that Amazon keeps sales figures for its Kindle line of tablets, well, a secret. Fortunately, some analyst from Morgan Stanley got his crystal ball out of its magic cupboard to give us some estimates how well Amazon's Kindle business is really doing. AllThingsD reports:
$5.5 billion a big number, but not that big if you keep in mind that, in 2012, Amazon's total revenue was a whopping $61 billion, with forecasts for 2013 somewhere between $73 and $76 billion. And e-books? Again, the shiny crystal ball has the answer:
[image by anurag agnihotri via Flickr] |
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Free Digital Magazines from the Public Library |
03:27 PM by tubemonkey in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No... This is a spinoff from another thread meant to inform more people about borrowing magazines via Zinio from public libraries. Recorded Books Partners with Zinio to offer Digital Magazines at Public Libraries
Think of this as the OverDrive for magazines. According to this article, there are over 1,400 libraries offering this service; so there's a strong chance a library near you may have it. At least five of my libraries do. Just like the number of ebooks varies from library to library, so do the number of magazines. If one your libraries doesn't have a particular magazine, then another might. It pays to belong to as many libraries as you can. So, how do you download them? First, check to see if your library offers Zinio. Look for it in the digital download section. Next step is to set up your accounts. You'll need a library account and two Zinio accounts. It's quite easy. See the following for help: Tutorials / Help
Borrowing Facts
These magazines can be read on multiple devices via the Zinio app. They're stored in Zinio's cloud and can be downloaded and removed as often as you want. Just remember to borrow magazines from your library's Zinio portal and not directly from Zinio. The two are not the same. Your library will only have around 200 magazines in its collection compared to over 5,500 in Zinio's. If you've previously purchased magazines from Zinio, the magazines you borrow will show up alongside them. Essentially, you're getting free magazine subscriptions; as long as you check out the latest issue. There's no ability to borrow issues you've missed; you'll need to purchase them. |
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