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

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's time for our weekly roundup of what's new and interesting in the world of e-books.

E-Book General - News

• Simon & Schuster has reached deal with Amazon.
• Barnes & Noble's latest collaboration with Samsung is the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook 10.1

03:37 AM by afv011 in E-Book General | News

After rolling out the 7-inch Galaxy Tab 4 Nook earlier this year, Samsung and Barnes & Noble have announced that they're launching a larger variant based on the 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab 4.

The hardware on the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook 10.1 is exactly the same as that as what Samsung offers with the standard Galaxy Tab 4. The difference is in the software, with the tablet eschewing Samsung's TouchWiz skin for Barnes & Noble's Nook software, which is "optimized for reading and entertainment."

Link

08:06 AM by apesmom in E-Book General | News

From Publisher's Weekly. It kinda sounds like the current situation, agency with discounting to a point.

The multi-year agreement moves the e-book discount policy back towards the original agency plan, and will let S&S set the e-book prices while giving Amazon room for some discounting. The deal is believed to keep the amount of money authors earn from the sale of e-books at current levels.

I'm sure this isn't going to help Hachette's position.

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

If you missed our frontpage news at any point this week, here is the best way to catch up:

E-Book General - News

• Adobe DE 4 spies on users
• Washington Post is now FREE on Kindles
• Simon & Schuster testing the DRM-free waters
• Economist essay: From Papyrus to Pixels

10:24 AM by AnemicOak in E-Book General | News

Simon & Schuster's fledgling science fiction and fantasy imprint, Saga Press, will publish its e-books without DRM, the company said Wednesday afternoon.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...-drm-free.html

said Joe Monti, executive editor of Saga. "In launching our imprint, we are pleased to offer this convenience to our readers and test the waters of DRM-free publishing.”

More about Saga Press...
S&S Sci Fi, Fantasy Imprint Gets Name, Logo
Simon & Schuster to Launch Science Fiction, Fantasy Imprint

10:24 AM by Antoinekamel in E-Book General | News

The Washington Post Is Now Free On Amazon Kindles
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/06/the...mazon-kindles/
@Mod: It's in news forum because, IMO, this is more a news/reading/marketing article than simply a device-specific feature.

The Washington Post is now available as a free app on Amazon Kindle Fire tablets. The announcement comes a little more than a year after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the the newspaper.

According to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek, the app was developed by a group inside the Post called Project Rainbow. The project, led by Kerry Lauerman, will offer a curated selection of news and photographs. The app is currently free for download now on all larger tablets. As with WaPo’s other digital offerings, subscription rates will eventually kick in. The new Fire tablets will already have the app installed.

[...]

“Reporters need to know that they will be supported, that their colleagues aren’t going to disappear and that they can do their job without being worried all the time about losing it. Optimism, like negativity, can be infectious,” executive editor of the Washington Post, Marty Baron told the New York Times.

There’s already an app for iPhone+iPod Touch, Android and iPad, as well as the mobile web. All of those already offer a pretty robust selection of free select content from the print version of the paper, as well as a subscription format. Digital subscriptions to content on the web start at $14.99.

Kindle offers other major newspaper apps such as USA Today and the New York Times for free on all Kindle Fire tablets.

E-inkers, breathe deeply. Free only the app for Fires, folks.

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

The Economist has a new essay out:

From Papyrus to Pixels
The Digital Transformation has Just Begun

http://www.economist.com/news/essays...ountered-vault

I'm on a big deadline at work, and haven't had time to read it yet, but even the visual way it's presented in my browser is pretty interesting.

09:58 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

Over at the Digital Reader Blog Nate reports:

My source told me, and I can confirm, that Adobe is tracking users in the app and uploading the data to their servers. (Adobe was contacted in advance of publication, but declined to respond.)

And just to be clear, I have seen this happen, and I can also tell you that Benjamin Daniel Mussler, the security researcher who found the security hole on Amazon.com, has also tested this at my request and saw it with his own eyes.

Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. All of this data, including the title, publisher, and other metadata for the book is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text.

I am not joking; Adobe is not only logging what users are doing, they’re also sending those logs to their servers in such a way that anyone running one of the servers in between can listen in and know everything,

But wait, there’s more.

Adobe isn’t just tracking what users are doing in DE4; this app was also scanning my computer, gathering the metadata from all of the ebooks sitting on my hard disk, and uploading that data to Adobe’s servers.

In. Plain. Text.

More at the source:

http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/1...comment-660086