05:47 AM by gebederry in E-Book General | News

enhanced PPI and RAM

Amazon US link

Amazon CA link

Amazon JP link

Amazon UK link

[See also the thread in the Kindle forum]

05:46 AM by j777p in E-Book Readers | Amazon Kindle

Shipping June 30th

$119
£109

"New, Highest Resolution Paperwhite Display—300 Pixels per Inch for Laser-Quality Text

The new Kindle Paperwhite adds our highest resolution Paperwhite display, delivering the same 300 pixels per inch that readers love about the top-of-the-line Kindle Voyage. With unsurpassed resolution and 2x the pixels as the previous generation Kindle Paperwhite, the display delivers laser-quality text, making it easy to read comfortably at any font size, including at smaller fonts so you can fit more words on each page. Even with the new higher resolution display, Kindle Paperwhite delivers battery life that is measured in weeks rather than hours.

New Bookerly Font and Typography Features—Read Faster With Less Eyestrain

Kindle Paperwhite now offers Bookerly, an exclusive font designed from the ground up for reading on digital screens. Warm and contemporary, Bookerly is inspired by the artistry of the best fonts in modern print books, but is hand-crafted for great readability at any size. It introduces a lighter, more graceful look and outperforms other digital reading fonts to help customers read faster with less eyestrain. See Bookerly: www.amazon.com/bookerly.

The new Kindle Paperwhite also offers an all-new typesetting engine that lays out words just as the author intended:

Hyphenation and improved spacing—Kindle Paperwhite adds hyphenation to break words at the right place, creates paragraphs with consistent lines, and adjusts the space between words. This results in more natural word spacing and more words on each page, which allows for faster reading with less eyestrain. See an example: www.amazon.com/hyphenation.

Improved character placement—New kerning and ligatures automatically adjust character spacing to make it easier and faster to recognize words at any font size. Similar to a typesetter formatting a print book, Kindle Paperwhite will look at neighboring pairs of letters in context and adjust the character spacing to suit the word, removing distracting whitespace between letters and making the shape of the word more beautiful to help with word recognition speed. For example, in the word “quietly”, the tail of the “y” loops under the “l” to make the letters of the word fit better together. In the word “first”, the “f” and “i” are drawn together to make a ligature. See an example: www.amazon.com/characterspacing.

Beautiful page layout—Print books often use drop caps to add emphasis and beauty to the first page of a chapter. In eBooks, this is challenging to replicate given the ability to adjust font size and line spacing. The new typesetting engine presents drop caps, text, and images on Kindle just as the author intended, and dynamically adjusts the layout as the reader changes the text size. See an example: www.amazon.com/dropcaps.

Large fonts, without compromises—One of the benefits of reading on Kindle is that you can customize the font size based on personal preference—over half of Kindle customers take advantage of this feature and use a font size larger than the default. As you increase the size of a font, fewer words appear on each page, often creating distractions like large white space or broken sentences. Now, Kindle Paperwhite automatically adapts when a reader chooses the largest font sizes, customizing the margins, columns, indents, nested lists, borders, and drop caps to keep the page easy to read. See an example: www.amazon.com/largefonts."

The new Kindle Paperwhite is $119. It is available for pre-order around the world and will start shipping June 30. Order now at www.amazon.com/paperwhite.

06:20 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/

06:58 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.

06:58 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.

06:58 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

10:28 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.

07:00 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