Amazon launched the Kindle, which is now in its seventh generation, in 2007. Sales peaked in 2011 at around 13.44m
Waterstones has admitted that sales of Amazon's Kindle ebook reader had "disappeared" after seeing higher demand for physical books.
The UK's largest book retailing chain, which teamed up with Amazon in 2012 to sell the Kindle in its stores, saw sales of physical books rise 5pc in December, at the expense of the popular e-reader.
Kindle sales had “disappeared to all intents and purposes”, Waterstones said.
James Daunt, chief executive, told the Financial Times that the resurgence in popularity of hardback and paperback books was due to Waterstones refurbishing some of its 290 shops.
Head office also handed more control over what stores sold to the managers running them, so they could cater their stock to local tastes.
Amazon launched the Kindle, which is now in its seventh generation, in 2007. Sales peaked in 2011 at around 13.44m, accoding to Forbes. That figure fell to 9.7m in 2012, with sales flat the following year. It is estimated that Amazon has sold around 30m Kindles in total.
At the same time, British consumers spent £2.2bn on print in 2013, compared with just £300m on ebooks, according to Nielsen.
US book giant Barnes & Noble is looking to spin off its Nook ereader business, which is estimated to be losing $70m a year. Meanwhile, core sales, excluding Nook, rose 5pc in the most recent quarter.
Help us select the next book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for January, 2014.
Book selection category for January is:
Second Chance
There will be no nominations this month. The way Second Chance works is that the poll is comprised of selections that either came in second place or tied for second place during the previous 11 months.
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. Here are the selections you will be considering:
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
• Cocaine Blues (Phryne Fisher #1) by Kerry Greenwood
• Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
• Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
• The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
• The Iron King by Maurice Druon
• The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde
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February: Romance • The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger Zola (Exclusive)
Spoiler:
Full Description (from Zola):
The Time Traveler’s Wife, one of the best romance books of all time, is now available as an eBook!
Audrey Niffenegger's dazzling debut is the story of Clare, a beautiful, strong-minded art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: his genetic clock randomly resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous and unpredictable, and lend a spectacular urgency to Clare and Henry's unconventional love story. That their attempt to live normal lives together is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control makes their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.
Plus, the long-awaited sequel to Audrey Niffenegger’s time-traveling love story is finally here!
The ebook includes the first 25 pages of Niffeneger’s sequel featuring Henry and Clare’s daughter, Alba. Gifted with Clare’s beauty and Henry’s unique abilities, Alba finds herself caught between her real-time husband, Zach, and her other husband, Oliver, a fellow time-traveler and musician.
Get your ebook today and dive into this classic romance novel. Find the rest of Audrey Niffenegger’s books here and more of the best love story books. Shop eBooks today!
With all the flash and fireworks of Wolfe's writing, it's easy to overlook that, at bottom, he's a great reporter. And this long and intimate look into the lives, minds, and deeds of the men who rode the first American rockets into space remains Wolfe's best book and the first true classic from the dawn of space exploration. The race with the Russians, the dauntless Chuck Yeager—Wolfe piles story upon story, and the pile glows.
Bantam, 1996.
We all know and love the movie, but as we all know "the book is always better than the movie". Let's find out if that is true and discuss together...
May: Mystery/Thriller • Cocaine Blues (Phryne Fisher #1) by Kerry Greenwood Amazon US / Kobo
Spoiler:
The Amazon description:
From Publishers Weekly
The growing American audience for Phryne Fisher, Australian author Greenwood's independent 1920s female sleuth, will be delighted that her diverting first mystery is finally available in the U.S. Fisher's off-the-cuff solving of a high society jewel theft leads her to her first professional engagement when a witness to her brilliance asks her to investigate a possible poisoning-in-progress. The detective's admirable willingness to intervene to help those in distress involves her in a variety of other puzzles, including identifying the King of Snow, who has taken over the Melbourne drug trade. Many of the members of Fisher's entourage familiar from later novels make their debuts as well.
From Booklist
Australian Greenwood has been exporting her outstanding Phryne Fisher series to the U.S. for the past several years, but the books haven't arrived in chronological order. Finally, we have the series debut, which explains how the irrepressible flapper (the series is set in the 1920s) became a detective. Phryne fans will relish the chance to see how beloved characters like Bert, Cec, Dot, and Inspector Robinson wandered into Phryne's life, and newcomers will enjoy getting to know ultrafashionable Phryne, who's wealthy enough to do whatever she wants but whose previous poverty has created a strong empathy for the working class. In Melbourne to investigate the mysterious illness of the daughter of a family friend, Phryne stumbles into a case involving two of the 1920s' signature evils: cocaine and back-alley abortions. Banding together with a crew of colorful local characters, and finding time to indulge in some erotic fun with a sexy Russian dancer, Phryne soon leaves her mark on Melbourne. From beginning to end, Greenwood infuses her series with evocative settings, multidimensional characters, and satisfying mysteries.
June: Award Winners • Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein Amazon US
Spoiler:
In one of Robert Heinlein's most controversial bestsellers, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe--and into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry against mankind's most frightening enemy.
Amazon.com Review Oliver Sacks on Your Inner Fish:
(Since the 1970 publication of Migraine, neurologist Oliver Sacks's unusual and fascinating case histories of "differently brained" people and phenomena—a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a community of people born totally colorblind, musical hallucinations, to name a few--have been marked by extraordinary compassion and humanity, focusing on the patient as much as the condition. His books include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film), and 2007's Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is Professor of Clinical Neurology at Columbia University.)
Your Inner Fish is my favorite sort of book—an intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story, one which will change forever how you understand what it means to be human.
The field of evolutionary biology is just beginning an exciting new age of discovery, and Neil Shubin's research expeditions around the world have redefined the way we now look at the origins of mammals, frogs, crocodiles, tetrapods, and sarcopterygian fish—and thus the way we look at the descent of humankind. One of Shubin's groundbreaking discoveries, only a year and a half ago, was the unearthing of a fish with elbows and a neck, a long-sought evolutionary "missing link" between creatures of the sea and land-dwellers.
My own mother was a surgeon and a comparative anatomist, and she drummed it into me, and into all of her students, that our own anatomy is unintelligible without a knowledge of its evolutionary origins and precursors. The human body becomes infinitely fascinating with such knowledge, which Shubin provides here with grace and clarity. Your Inner Fish shows us how, like the fish with elbows, we carry the whole history of evolution within our own bodies, and how the human genome links us with the rest of life on earth.
Shubin is not only a distinguished scientist, but a wonderfully lucid and elegant writer; he is an irrepressibly enthusiastic teacher whose humor and intelligence and spellbinding narrative make this book an absolute delight. Your Inner Fish is not only a great read; it marks the debut of a science writer of the first rank.
The Time Traveller, a dreamer obsessed with traveling through time, builds himself a time machine and, much to his surprise, travels over 800,000 years into the future. He lands in the year 802701: the world has been transformed by a society living in apparent harmony and bliss, but as the Traveler stays in the future he discovers a hidden barbaric and depraved subterranean class. Wells's transparent commentary on the capitalist society was an instant bestseller and launched the time-travel genre.
September: Banned/Challenged Books • The Giver by Lois Lowry (Tie for 2nd place) Amazon US / Goodreads
Spoiler:
From Goodreads:
Jonas' world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear or pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the Community. When Jonas turns twelve, he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. There is no turning back.
Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep south—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred, available now for the first time as an e-book.
One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father-a crusading local lawyer-risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
October: Patricia Clark Memorial Library • The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells The Patricia Clark Memorial Library:EPub | Kindle
The Iron King – Philip the Fair – is as cold and silent, as handsome and unblinking as a statue. He governs his realm with an iron hand, but he cannot rule his own family: his sons are weak and their wives adulterous; while his red-blooded daughter Isabella is unhappily married to an English king who prefers the company of men.
A web of scandal, murder and intrigue is weaving itself around the Iron King; but his downfall will come from an unexpected quarter. Bent on the persecution of the rich and powerful Knights Templar, Philip sentences Grand Master Jacques de Molay to be burned at the stake, thus drawing down upon himself a curse that will destroy his entire dynasty
The American Minister and his family have bought the English stately home Canterville Chase, complete with the ghost of Sir Simon de Canterville - blood-stains, clanking chains and all. But these modern Americans will have no truck with ghostly goings-on, and set out to beat the spectre at his own game. (Summary by David Barnes)
At long last, we’re thrilled to welcome Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to Scribd. They’ve long been one of our favorite publishers, with a long history of publishing books from some of the most beloved and celebrated writers of all time, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Robert Penn Warren, Umberto Eco, Ursula K. Le Guin, and more.
Telling users how to strip the DRM from their legally purchased ebooks is not contributory copyright infringement, according to a ruling last month by a federal judge in New York.
The Annual Reading Challenge is neither a race, contest, nor an "exclusive club", anyone can join! This is just a fun activity that some of us have enjoyed doing in the past. Many of us have found reading challenges to be an entertaining way to set goals for ourselves, get ideas for books, and see what others are reading.
This thread is for you to keep a running tally for your chosen challenge. I would request that you please state your goals at the top of your post (in the title line if you can), and then start your list in the body of your post. As you read books, edit your post to update your list of books read.
[Please Remember: No discussion posts in this thread. Please use the other thread for that. Non-List posts will be deleted or moved to the other thread]
Post #2 is dedicated to a Table of Contents for all participants in this thread. Names will be added, to this TOC, in alphabetical order with a link to that individual’s post number from this thread.