10:42 AM by JoHunt in E-Book General | News

Amazon have just launched Kindle Unlimited in their Canadian store:

"Enjoy unlimited reading from over 750,000 titles on any device for just CDN$ 9.99 a month."

That's just US$8 according to current rate of exchange.

Kindle Unlimited at Amazon Canada

Kindle Unlimited also launched in Mexico today for 129 pesos (US$8.60) a month.

Kindle Unlimited at Amazon Mexico

Venture Beat article

10:17 AM by ottdmk in E-Book General | News

Caught this on the Newsarama site.

Looking through the article it sounds like Marvel will be making trade paperbacks available, as opposed to single issues of its comics.

The interesting thing to me is that Marvel already has its own subscription service, Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited. I wonder if Marvel is looking to move out of that business space?

06:38 AM by drjenkins in E-Book General | News

I saw this at Cory Doctorow's fabulous site BoingBoing.

Kickstarting a new life for out-of-print sf classics
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/05/kic...fe-for-ou.html

Singularity is looking to, once again, rescue out-of-print SF and make them available as free or low cost e-books.

They have met their goal of $15,000, but it's not too late to make a pledge.

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

Previously at MobileRead:

E-Book General - News

• Yet ANOTHER Harper Lee Novel!
• Turn your paper books into (Kindle) e-books
• Australians Love Affair with eBooks

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• February Book Club Vote

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.