03:09 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

The blogosphere has finally noticed a change that MobileRead members reported a week ago: Amazon is shipping a new Kindle Paperwhite.

The 2014 Kindle Paperwhite looks identical to last year's model, but it comes with a special surprise. Amazon has bumped the available storage from 1.3GB to 3.1GB while keeping all the other specs the same.

The new model with the extra storage has been sighted in Canada, France, and Germany, but not the US. It looks like anyone who wants one will need to order it specifically. The link below will take you to the correct page.

Amazon hasn't announced or explained the change, simply saying that "This is not a new product – we’ve added more on-device storage to the existing Kindle Paperwhite".

Amazon.com

The Digital Reader

You can join the ongoing discussion here.

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Have something interesting to say about e-books or mobile computing? Join our forums and share your view on topics like the ones discussed at MobileRead this past week...

E-Book General - News

• End of Sony consumer readers confirmed

06:32 PM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

Comes third hand via the Digital Reader Blog via lesen.net:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/0.../#.U9zeEo7D_MJ

Sony has confirmed today that they will not be making another ebook reader – not even for their sole remaining market in Japan.

There will be no PRS-T4, and lesen.net reports that the remaining stock of the Sony Reader PRS-T3 will be sold until it runs out. That device was was launched last fall in Europe but never shipped in the US, so I’m not sure how many people actually have one.

TBH, this comes as no surprise. After Sony first pulled out of the North American ebook market, and then a short while later abandoned Europe and Australia, there was little reason for Sony to develop a new model

Expected but still...

Hindsight being 20-20; they did have an amazing knack of zigging when the market was zagging.

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Here are the highlights from the past seven days of MobileRead:

E-Book General - News

• Author Earnings looks at Nook... and Hachette...
• Apple acquired BookLamp
• Kindle iOS 4.4
• Format shifting now legal in the UK

06:35 AM by avantman42 in E-Book General | News

I doubt it makes much practical difference, since many people assumed it was legal anyway, and circumventing DRM isn't allowed. All that said, I'm happy to see this change, because I think it's reasonable to want to format shift, and reasonable activities shouldn't be illegal.

The exception is limited to personal use of lawfully obtained originals, and does not allow any sharing of the works, including with close family members.*It also does not allow for the removal of any anti-copy technical protection measures, including those found on most DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. Given most media consumption is moving to a pure digital environment constrained by such measures, it remains to be seen how effective the new right will be in practice. How many people will be ripping CDs in ten years time?

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog...ar-last-hurdle

10:34 AM by Loosheesh in E-Book General | News

The latest Kindle iOS app update has some interesting new features (I think they've been getting ideas from Marvin ):

Kindle for iOS Version 4.4 provides several customer-requested features that make sync and navigation easier.

Sync to the most recent page read - Any books you are reading on Kindle for iOS will now sync to the most recent page read across all Kindle devices and/or reading apps registered to your Amazon account. Customers can still manually sync to the furthest page read from the left navigation menu.

Kindle Placeholders - Allow customers the freedom to explore other areas of the book without losing their current place. Jump directly to previous locations with "placeholders" on the progress bar.

Notes Export - Studying for the next exam or writing the next term paper just got easier. Students can now export notes, highlights, and more to e-mail from their "Print Replica" textbooks, giving students easy access to their information.

Wikipedia Smart Lookup - Select a word and learn more from Wikipedia in the Info Card at the bottom of the page.

Performance and stability improvements.

(Above text copied from: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/07/29/...-improvements/)

07:21 AM by jhowell in E-Book General | News

I haven't seen this mentioned here yet. Forgive me if I missed a thread on this.

TechCrunch: Apple Secretly Acquired “Pandora For Books” Startup BookLamp To Battle Amazon

BookLamp’s most well-known product was the Book Genome Project, a platform that let users find suggestions for books to read based on natural language analysis of other titles. BookLamp’s tech and talent could help Apple improve its iBooks service with better recommendations, search, and categorization.

07:20 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

Well, now, this one is unexpected...

http://authorearnings.com/july-2014-barnes-noble/

Oh, not the indie vs tradpub breakdowns--those mirror Kindle, as generally expected:

More striking, though, is the market share gained by indie authors. If you scrolled through Nook’s genre bestseller lists, and tallied each book and how it was published, you would find that over half are now self-published.

While Nook’s e-book market share is much smaller than Amazon’s overall, it is just as indie-friendly as the Kindle store. And the daily royalty share going to indies is nearly twice as large as the share going to Penguin Random House authors. In fact, indies seem to be on their way to overtaking the Big 5 combined, just as they have on Amazon.

But, comparing their February Nook look to the new July numbers...

One thing of note with the last three sets of charts is that Hachette titles have suffered on the Nook store over the past five months. It’s possible the ongoing negotiations between Amazon and Hachette are impacting their sales on other digital retail outlets.

Hachette has... uhmm... declined... from 9% of Nook total sales to 7%...
About 20%…

Good thing there is a massive exodus of buyers from Amazon.