05:20 AM by trainboy in E-Book General | News

via infoDOCKET.

New coalition of organizations launches web page and tool.

"The page features examples of the “price gap” between consumer and library prices, illustrated by a selection of popular titles, and includes social media sharing with hashtag #FairEbookPrices, as well as email collection for those interested in updates on the issue"

At the bottom of the post I also noticed links to two recent reports about library access to ebooks in Canada.

http://www.infodocket.com/2015/06/15...ublic-website/

05:58 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN

Beginning July 1, 2015, we'll switch from paying Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners' Lending Library (KOLL) royalties based on qualified borrows, to paying based on the number of pages read. We're making this switch in response to great feedback we received from authors who asked us to better align payout with the length of books and how much customers read. Under the new payment method, you'll be paid for each page individual customers read of your book, the first time they read it.

No real impact to readers except now it no longer favors shorts and serials over novels quite as much.

They are also introducing a new metric:

Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC v1.0)

To determine a book's page count in a way that works across genres and devices, we've developed the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC). We calculate KENPC based on standard settings (e.g. font, line height, line spacing, etc.), and we'll use KENPC to measure the number of pages customers read in your book, starting with the Start Reading Location (SRL) to the end of your book. Amazon typically sets SRL at chapter 1 so readers can start reading the core content of your book as soon as they open it.

This standardized approach allows us to identify pages in a way that works across genres and devices. Non-text elements within books including images, charts and graphs will count toward a book’s KENPC.

05:58 AM by Dopedangel in E-Book General | News

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...ooks-contracts

Now Amazon seems to be under the fire of EU.

05:58 AM by AnemicOak in E-Book General | News

Thought this might be of interest to some folks. The US Copyright Office has just published a 234 page report on Orphan Works & Mass Digitization.

PDF link
http://copyright.gov/orphan/reports/...-works2015.pdf

09:28 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

From Publisher's weekly:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...-february.html

For the first two months of 2015, adult book sales were down 7.5% and sales of children/young adult titles were off 15.5%. At the end of the two month period, e-books accounted for 31.3% of adult sales compared to 33.0% in the first two months of 2014. In the children/young adult category, e-books accounted for 13.0% of sales in the January-February period in 2015, down from 18.5% in the comparable 2014 period.

Results are based on sales from 1,210 publishers who supply data to AAP’s StatShot program.

AAP numbers are normally year to year dollars, not unit sales.
Recently, they've been masking the decline of mass market paperback by combining those sales with trade paperbacks (so they could report growth in paperback) but apparently this time the drop was too big to mask so they're back to split reporting.

It lets them report a gain *somewhere*.

Gory details at the source.

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Been away? Fear not! Here is your chance to check out what appeared on our frontpage this week:

E-Book General - News

• Baen can no longer provide automatic delivery to Kindle by email.
• Interesting Kindle Upgrade

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• June 2015 Book Club Vote

03:39 AM by Waylander in E-Book General | News

Saw this in my daily The Passive Voice email:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046678/...at-doesnt-suck

Apparently, the update is being rolled out to the actual ereaders later in the summer, so no specific date, but it is coming soon.

What does anyone else think?

03:34 AM by gbm in E-Book General | News

This was posted on Baen's Bar today.

Dear Baen Ebooks customer,

Starting on or about June 10, 2015, Baen Ebooks will no longer be able to provide automatic delivery of the .mobi format to a Kindle device via the "Email book to my Kindle" feature. We have just learned that to comply with Amazon's Terms of Use, Baen Ebooks cannot use Amazon's Personal Documents Service to deliver paid content.

They have updated the ereader instructions page:

For more information on how to load Baen Ebooks onto your Kindle device, check out our Ereader Instruction page: http://www.baenebooks.com/t-ereaderi...ns.aspx#kindle

bernie