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Sat February 07 2015

MobileRead Week in Review: 01/31 - 02/07
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

Wed February 04 2015

Australians Love Affair with eBooks
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%.
[ 33 replies ]

Turn your paper books into (Kindle) e-books
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.
[ 45 replies ]

Yet ANOTHER Harper Lee Novel!
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
[ 121 replies ]

January 2015 Author Earnings report
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.
[ 5 replies ]

Oyster announces partnership with Pottermore
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.”
[ 7 replies ]

Sun February 01 2015

February Book Club Vote
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 Spoiler: A medical miracle may have bought Hazel a few years, but she’s still a terminal time bomb, suffering from stage IV cancer. At a support group for her illness, she meets fellow cancer survivor Augustus Waters, a boy who pretends to smoke cigarettes and has a prosthetic leg. With a shared obsession for the novel An Imperial Affliction and a similar sense of sarcasm, the two fall in love, despite their inevitable fate. John Green’s story is honest and hilarious, exposing the fear, anger, and sadness that accompanies a terminal illness. • The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub / ePub (Complete Works) / Kindle \| Feedbooks / Google Play / ManyBooks / Project Gutenberg Spoiler: The Age of Innocence (1920) is a novel by Edith Wharton, which won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. The story occurs among New York City's upper class in the 1870s, before electricity, telephone, and automobiles; when there was a small cluster of old, "aristocratic" Revolutionary War-stock families who ruled New York's social life; when being was better than doing; when occupation and abilities were secondary to blood connections (heredity and family); when reputation and appearances excluded every thing and every one not of one's caste; and when Fifth Avenue was so deserted by nightfall that it was possible to follow Society's comings and goings, by spying who went to what house. • Ali and Nino: A Love Story by Kurban Said Goodreads Spoiler: First published in Vienna in 1937, this classic story of romance and adventure has been compared to Dr. Zhivago and Romeo and Juliet. Its mysterious author was recently the subject of a feature article in the New Yorker, which has inspired a forthcoming biography. Out of print for nearly three decades until the hardcover re-release last year, Ali and Nino is Kurban Said's masterpiece. It is a captivating novel as evocative of the exotic desert landscape as it is of the passion between two people pulled apart by culture, religion, and war. • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro Amazon Australia Spoiler: As a child, Kathy – now thirty-one years old – lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory. And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed – even comforted – by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now. • Latakia by JF Smith Amazon Australia / SmashWords Spoiler: Matthew likes his life in Richmond. He has his friends and his softball and his volunteer work. And he has a very good-looking boyfriend, Brian, who he’s been happily dating for over a year now. So what if his friends tend to question just how good his boyfriend is, and so what if Brian tends to have inexplicable mood swings. And so what if Brian seems to invite Matt’s suspicions on occasion. If he just shows a little faith and trust, he’ll appreciate what he has with Brian the way he should. Right? But suddenly, Matt finds himself in a desperate life-or-death situation on a trip overseas, and he realizes just how much he misses home, and Brian. He’s luckily rescued by a team of US Spec-Ops Forces, only to find out they’re a bunch of bigoted jerks. Worse, a quirk of his situation forces him to spend time with them that he’d rather not. And that’s when he finds out that first impressions can be misleading. When called upon, he steps up when every fiber of his being tells him not to, and discovers something deep inside himself that he didn’t realize was even there. And his life will never be the same. He finds that he can, after all, make some very overdue changes in his own life. What Matt doesn’t realize is that the bond of brotherhood runs both ways. And he winds up changing the lives of several of the men on that Spec-Ops team as much as they changed his. All it takes is faith and trust. • Tigers and Devils by Sean Kennedy Amazon Australia Spoiler: The most important things in Simon Murray’s life are football, friends, and film—in that order. His friends despair of him ever meeting someone, but despite his loneliness, Simon is cautious about looking for more. Then his best friends drag him to a party, where he barges into a football conversation and ends up defending the honour of star forward Declan Tyler—unaware that the athlete is present. In that first awkward meeting, neither man has any idea they will change each other's lives forever. Like his entire family, Simon revels in living in Melbourne, the home of Australian Rules football and mecca for serious fans. There, players are treated like gods—until they do something to fall out of public favour. This year, the public is taking Declan to task for suffering injuries outside his control, so Simon's support is a bright spot. But as Simon and Declan fumble toward a relationship, keeping Declan's homosexuality a secret from well-meaning friends and an increasingly suspicious media becomes difficult. Nothing can stay hidden forever. Soon Declan will have to choose between the career he loves and the man he wants, and Simon has never been known to make things easy—for himself or for others. • Echoes by Maeve Binchy Goodreads \| Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble UK / Barnes & Noble US / Kobo Spoiler: From Goodreads: "It was sometimes called the echo cave, and if you shouted your question loud enough in the right direction, you got an answer instead of an echo..." Clare and David--divided as children by a rigid social code that branded her as shanty Irish and him as gentry...brought together as adults by a desire that knew no class, no barriers, only the urgent hunger of two people destined to love--and ready to defy a world determined to keep them apart. Even at fifteen, David Power knew the echo would answer eleven-year-old Clare O'Brien's dearest wish, to win a school prize. But it was years before Dr. Power's cherished only son saw in the huckster's daughter the answer to his own heart's desire. Here in Castlebay, perched precariously on the seaside cliffs, the lines between them were clearly drawn. Clare's only hope is to leave the town where time stopped, propelled by scholarships to Dublin, fueled by her own drive and brilliance, far from the insular, gossipy world of Castlebay and those in its thrall... Angela O'Hara, beautiful, isolated, a teacher trapped in the convent school, who risks everything to help Clare escape... Gerry Doyle, the town charmer who finds in Clare the woman he vows to have at any price... Caroline Nolan, the beautiful, rich outsider who comes to plunder... For Clare, that was before the wild freedom of Dublin, and love. And David. Before fate drove them back to Castlebay, and the past... • Fighting Redemption by Kate McCarthy Goodreads Spoiler: Ryan Kendall is broken. He understands pain. He knows the hand of violence and the ache of loss. He knows what it means to fail those who need you. Being broken doesn’t stop him wanting the one thing he can’t have; Finlay Tanner. Her smile is sweet and her future bright. She’s the girl he grew up with, the girl he loves, the girl he protects from the world, and from himself. • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Patricia Clark Memorial Library: Kindle \| Kobo Spoiler: No synopsis provided. The nominations are now closed.
[ 68 replies - poll! ]

Sat January 24 2015

MobileRead Week in Review: 01/17 - 01/24
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

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