08:07 AM by Lin2412 in E-Book General | News

I'm definitely not Australian, but I'm glad of this news!

[more love for ebooks in Australia article]

eBook sales have flattened out or even begun to decrease in North America and the UK. This isn’t the case in Australia though, where in the last two years the industry has seen rapid growth.

The proportion of Australians aged 18-24 buying eBooks online in any given three-month period has also increased, from 3.9% in 2013 to 5.1% in 2014 — despite being the only age group to have seen a decrease in reading incidence (from 55.3% to 53.3%).
Meanwhile, the 65+ age group showed a growing willingness to adopt this new technology, with the proportion purchasing eBooks rising from 4.1% to 5.4% — a higher proportion than some of the younger age groups that have grown up in the digital age. Reading books in general also increased among this older demographic, from 64.5% to 67.1%.

08:05 AM by ElspethB in E-Book General | News

Amazon has released software called Kindle Convert that enables you to convert printed books into Kindle format, according to this article.

Of course, you still have to go to the trouble of scanning your book, spread by spread or page by page, depending on the book size and your scanner. Way back in the late 90s I used to scan my books and use an OCR program to turn them into digital files that I could read on my Palm Pilot. It was laborious.

Still, for $19 I might try it out. I have a few old books I'd love to read on my devices for which no e-book exists.

08:03 AM by GlenBarrington in E-Book General | News

This publication pace is HARD to keep up with!

"Go Set A Watchman" what is essentially a sequel to "To Kill A Mockingbird", though written first will be published in July.

Link to story: http://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/...le9010301.html

08:02 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

Dig up your munchies of choice, there's a new report from AUTHOR EARNINGS:

http://authorearnings.com/report/jan...rnings-report/

The executive summary says it all.

Executive Summary

AuthorEarnings reports analyze detailed title-level data on 33% of all daily ebook sales in the U.S.

• 30% of the ebooks being purchased in the U.S. do not use ISBN numbers and are invisible to the industry’s official market surveys and reports; all the ISBN-based estimates of market share reported by Bowker, AAP, BISG, and Nielsen are wildly wrong.
  
• 33% of all paid ebook unit sales on Amazon.com are indie self-published ebooks.
  
• 20% of all consumer dollars spent on ebooks on Amazon.com are being spent on indie self-published ebooks.
  
• 40% of all dollars earned by authors from ebooks on Amazon.com are earned by indie self-published ebooks.
  
• In mid-year 2014, indie-published authors as a cohort began taking home the lion’s share (40%) of all ebook author earnings generated on Amazon.com while authors published by all of the Big Five publishers combined slipped into second place at 35%.

Details and raw data, with lots of pretty charts, at the source.

Here's a taste:

This is our fifth quarterly Author Earnings report. It is based on a data snapshot of 120,000 of the best selling ebooks on Amazon, giving us a deep cross-sectional data sample comprising roughly 50% of Amazon’s daily ebook sales. According to the publishing industry’s most oft-cited estimate, Amazon controls 67% of the U.S. ebook market. Thus the title-level data used in our analysis includes roughly 33% of all daily ebook sales in the U.S. No other industry survey or ebook market-size estimate comes close to this level of accuracy or detail.

(Later in the report, we’ll discuss some of the widely-cited official ebook market surveys and industry-wide sales estimates that the industry news sites and pundits rely on for their numbers — and we’ll show you why those surveys and estimates are so remarkably wrong.)

The methodology used in this report is identical to our four previous reports, published in Feburary, May, July, and October of 2014. We capture real-time data from Amazon.com’s thousands of public ebook bestseller lists and sublists. Using a software “spider,” we grab a snapshot of each of the hundreds of thousands of listed books and how well they are selling.

We then group these 120,000 bestselling Amazon ebook titles by publisher type, separating them into:

Indie Published (self-published titles)
Small or Medium Publisher (any publisher that publishes more than one author, but is not an imprint of one of the Big Five Publishers, not an Amazon Publishing imprint, and not a known self-published author collective)
Amazon Publishing (Amazon’s semi-traditional publishing imprints, such as Montlake, Thomas & Mercer, Skyscape, etc.)
Big Five Published (the imprints of Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster)
Uncategorized Single-Author Publisher (publishers who published only a single author in our dataset, but that were not the self-publishing DBA or LLC of a well-known indie author)

Edit: the section on ISBN usage is especially illuminating.
Turns out it isn't just indies that are forgoing them.

08:02 AM by Bookworm_Girl in E-Book General | News

Earlier this month Macmillan made 1000 titles in their backlist catalog available on Oyster and Scribd. Now the Harry Potter series is available on Oyster. It appears to be an exclusive for now. There are 3 additional Hogwarts-related books that aren't available on Kindle Unlimited. Those would be Quidditch Through the Ages, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard. They've also created custom themes for reading related to the various houses.

http://blog.oysterbooks.com/post/109...ne-and-ron-and

Harry Potter has consistently been one of the top ten searches on Oyster since we launched.

Today, the search is over. We’ve partnered with Pottermore to make Oyster the first and only place you can read every Harry Potter ebook through a subscription. We’re raising a glass of butterbeer in celebration, because we now have all seven of the main Harry Potter books AND the three Hogwarts Library Books by J.K. Rowling!

Make sure your Oyster app is updated to version 1.9 and ¾ (you can get it on the App Store and Google Play), and then open a Harry Potter title to get the full effect. Once inside, rather than one of Oyster’s reader themes, choose one of the new “House Themes”—with designs inspired by Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff—or tap the Sorting Hat icon to have one selected at random. Then dive into a custom reading experience inspired by your favorite Hogwarts House.

Here are some links to other articles.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/28/79...iption-service

Last year, Oyster co-founder Willem van Lancker told us the company's goal was to foster "a deeper sense of community around books." With Harry Potter, that work has already been done for Oyster — the franchise comes with its own built-in community.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/28/oys...-harry-potter/

I asked about whether young adult fiction is already popular on Oyster, and CEO Eric Stromberg told me in an emailed statement, “YA is one of our most popular genres and something many of our readers — of all ages — really enjoy.”

12:10 AM by WT Sharpe in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

February 2015 MobileRead Book Club Vote

Help us choose a book as the February 2015 eBook for the MobileRead Book Club. The poll will be open for 5 days. There will be no runoff vote unless the voting results a tie, in which case there will be a 3 day run-off poll. This is a visible poll: others can see how you voted. It is You may cast a vote for each book that appeals to you.

We will start the discussion thread for this book on February 20th. Select from the following Official Choices with three nominations each:

• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Goodreads | Amazon US / Barnes & Noble US / Google Play US / Kobo US / Overdrive UK / Overdrive US

• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub / ePub (Complete Works) / Kindle | Feedbooks / Google Play / ManyBooks / Project Gutenberg

• Ali and Nino: A Love Story by Kurban Said

Goodreads

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Amazon Australia

• Latakia by JF Smith

Amazon Australia / SmashWords

• Tigers and Devils by Sean Kennedy

Amazon Australia

• Echoes by Maeve Binchy

Goodreads | Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble UK / Barnes & Noble US / Kobo

• Fighting Redemption by Kate McCarthy

Goodreads

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Patricia Clark Memorial Library: Kindle | Kobo

The nominations are now closed.

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

Gosh we've talked a lot this week. Here's your weekly round up of MobileRead's events.

E-Book General - News

• Amazon launches eTextbook creator

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• February 2015 Book Club Nominations

09:21 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

Via Fortune:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazo...140000905.html

Amazon.com today announced KDP EDU, a new segment of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) designed to help educators and authors easily prepare, publish, and promote eTextbooks and other educational content for students to access on a broad range of devices, including Fire tablets, iPad, iPhone, Android smartphones and tablets, Mac, and PC. Educators and authors can use the public beta of Amazon’s new Kindle Textbook Creator tool to easily turn PDFs of their textbooks and course materials into Kindle books. Once the book is ready, authors can upload it to KDP in just a few simple steps to reach students worldwide. Get started today at kdp.amazon.com/edu.

Books created with Kindle Textbook Creator offer features for students and other readers that enhance the learning experience, including:

Multi-Color Highlighting—Highlight and categorize key concepts for easy reference.
Notebook—Capture key passages, images and bookmarks and automatically add them to the notebook. Students can add their own notes and easily access them from one location.
Flashcards—Create flashcards and study important terms, concepts, and definitions in each chapter with a simple, easy-to-use interface.
Dictionary—Find definitions and Wikipedia information for difficult terms to improve retention.
Buy Once, Read Everywhere—Read eTextbooks on the most popular devices students use, including Fire tablets, iPad, iPhone, Android tablets and smartphones, Mac, and PC.

More at the source and Amazon.

No mention of the eink readers but with the multicolor highlighting they're obviously targetting tablets.