11:23 AM by pilotbob in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Mobileread is happy to announce that we have added a forum section specifically for discussing reading on Windows Devices.

Windows Devices Forum

With the release of Windows 8, the Surface and also Windows Phone 8 there is now a large and growing market of these devices. Due to this it was time to provide a home for our members to discuss reading with these devices, and also device selection and other issues.

Feel free to discuss Windows Tablet, Phone and PC reading software and other tips and tricks.

Mobileread Team

10:55 AM by pdurrant in E-Book General | News

Amazon bought Liquavista from Samsung last March, so they've had the company for nearly a year now. I was just looking for news, and I came across some interesting job ads from Liquavista that were posted in the past month:

Operations Program Manager (Asia based)
Process Quality Engineer
Product Test Engineer
Process Development Engineer
Product Development Manager

and several others.

It looks to me like Liquavista think that the basic R&D is done, and that now they are moving towards mass production for a mass market product.

I have no idea how long a ramp up to volume production takes. I suppose they might just manage it in time for a product launch this Autumn.

But I'd be very surprised if we didn't see a Kindle using a Liquavista electro-wetting display by the end of 2015.

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

If you've been a bit too busy to keep up, here are a few of our favorite stories from the past week.

E-Book General - News

• EU Court of Justice on DRM circumvention
• Barnes & Noble Fired Its Nook Engineering Staff
• Hugh Howey presents: Amazon author earnings
• Author turned down $1.5 million book advances to continue to self-publish
• Open Road Media acquires E-Reads

05:48 AM by bgalbrecht in E-Book General | News

I used to buy a lot of E-Reads books back in the Fictionwise days, but I think they had been not been acquiring many new titles the last few years.

From the announcement:

Open Road Integrated Media, the largest independent ebook publisher, announced today that it has acquired E-Reads, the oldest independent ebook publisher in the field. E-Reads’ more than 1,200 titles, a majority of which are science fiction and fantasy and also span the mystery, thriller, romance, and horror genres, will now be published by Open Road and marketed through the company’s proprietary platform. E-Reads founder Richard Curtis will consult with Open Road during the transition.

05:48 AM by Top100EbooksRank in E-Book General | News

Saw this post from the PassiveVoice, it's interesting so I thought I would share.

http://www.thepassivevoice.com/02/20...in-trad-deals/

From author H.M. Ward on Kindleboards:

Over the past year I’ve been offered over 1.5 million bucks in advances offered by huge publishing houses. I told them to show me a marketing plan that knocks my socks off and I’d consider their offer. I had this notion that they knew what they were doing and could do it better than I could. They said they had all these ideas and they’re gonna blow my mind, which was a requirement for the deal, b/c the pay was too low.

About the money – if you have a book that hits #1-10 on the Kindle store, tons of people have the mistaken notion that it’s gonna blip and fall and you’re fun in the sun will end…unless a trad pub picks you up.

It’s math time! A book in the top ten sells around 5-10K copies per day. Let’s take the average and give the book some wiggle room and say it’s selling 7K copies a day @ $2.99. In 7 days you’ll have made (net, not gross) over $100,000. So BIG TRAD HOUSE offers you $200,000 for a three part series.

‘Sign here,’ they say. ‘Sign fast! You want to strike while the irons hot.’ ‘A bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush.’ ‘It’s a sure thing and if you don’t sign, then you could loose everything.’ <–They actually said all the crap to me, and its crap. If the book nets $100K in a week, what will it do next week? What about next month? What about next year? Never mind those other 2 books. Bad deal.

The most recent offer was for a high six figure deal on my next novel, on spec, sight unseen from one of the big 5. I gave the same terms – show me a kick *ss marketing plan and I’ll consider it. They were excited and on it! They were going to wow me. Like I was gonna be so wowed that I’d die of the wowness. True story.

Dude, the marketing plan I got back was the equivalent of, ‘we’re gonna do stuff.’ Their email list – yeah, they don’t personally have one, but this archaic place does – had 2K people on it. That was the bulk of their plan.

My email list has over 30K ppl on it and I do a ton more stuff than they presented.

11:27 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

Real world data massaged, charted, ready for analysis.
Lots of pretty pictures and insightful comment.

Original site:
http://authorearnings.com/

Since the site is overwhelmed with traffic, Joe Konrath is hosting a copy.
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2014/0...y-john-on.html
(With added commentary. Some quite droll.)

Howey says:

Sports stars, musicians, actors—their salaries are often discussed as a matter of course. This is less true for authors, and it creates unrealistic expectations for those who pursue writing as a career. Now with every writer needing to choose between self-publishing and submitting to traditional publishers, the decision gets even more difficult. We don’t want to screw up before we even get started.
When I faced these decisions, I had to rely on my own sales data and nothing more. Luckily, I had charted my daily sales reports as my works marched from outside the top one million right up to #1 on Amazon. Using these snapshots, I could plot the correlation between rankings and sales. It wasn’t long before dozens of self-published authors were sharing their sales rates at various positions along the lists in order to make author earnings more transparent to others [link] [link]. Gradually, it became possible to closely estimate how much an author was earning simply by looking at where their works ranked on public lists [link].
This data provided one piece of a complex puzzle. The rest of the puzzle hit my inbox with a mighty thud last week. I received an email from an author with advanced coding skills who had created a software program that can crawl online bestseller lists and grab mountains of data. All of this data is public—it’s online for anyone to see—but until now it’s been extremely difficult to gather, aggregate, and organize. This program, however, is able to do in a day what would take hundreds of volunteers with web browsers and pencils a week to accomplish. The first run grabbed data on nearly 7,000 e-books from several bestselling genre categories on Amazon. Subsequent runs have looked at data for 50,000 titles across all genres. You can ask this data some pretty amazing questions, questions I’ve been asking for well over a year [link]. And now we finally have some answers.
When Amazon reports that self-published books make up 25% of the top 100 list, the reaction from many is that these are merely the outliers. We hear that authors stand no chance if they self-publish and that most won’t sell more than a dozen copies in their lifetime if they do. (The same people rarely point out that all bestsellers are outliers and that the vast majority of those who go the traditional route are never published at all.) Well, now we have a large enough sample of data to help glimpse the truth. What emerges is, to my knowledge, the clearest public picture to date of what’s happening in this publishing revolution. It’s a lot to absorb, but I believe there’s much here to learn.

There is a whole lot more at the sites. With more to come.

I suspect a lot of debate will follow. Just consider this chart:

Spoiler:

[Click to enlarge]

Kabooom!

Edit: Original source site is accesible by now.
Report here:http://authorearnings.com/the-report/

04:57 PM by afv011 in E-Book General | News

"Barnes & Noble laid off its Nook hardware engineers, according to a source that tipped Business Insider.
The engineers were let go last Thursday, according to our source. This follows Barnes & Noble dismissing the VP of Hardware, Bill Saperstein in January."

Source

[EDIT]Later info says it's wasn't the hardware engineers.[/EDIT]

11:30 AM by pdurrant in E-Book General | News

From TechDirt.

In a case brought by Nintendo, the EUCJ has ruled that the European Directive on the Harmonisation of copyright "is designed only to protect the copyright holder against acts which require his authorisation" and "that the legal protection covers only the technological measures intended to prevent or eliminate unauthorised acts of reproduction, communication, public offer or distribution, for which authorisation from the copyrightholder is required. That legal protection must respect the principle of proportionality without prohibiting devices or activities which have a commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent the technical protection for unlawful purposes." (bold in the original)

In short, circumventing DRM might be legal if it is not done to infringe the copyright holder's copyright. And sale/distribution of DRM circumvention tools might be legal so long as they are mainly used for purposes which do not infringe copyright.

The full ruling (in English) can be read here. Other European Languages are available.

NB I am not a lawyer. Do not rely on this message for legal advice!