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

If you've been absent and are keen to find out what MobileRead was up to this week, check out the links below:

E-Book General - News

• (Sweden) Amazon looking at Sweden (from DN)
• Amazon now has Australian Kindle store.

E-Book General - General Discussions

• Google Books wins -- Fair Use says Judge

E-Book General - Deals, Freebies, and Resources (No Self-Promotion)

• Baen December Bundle - Expires 15th Nov - 6 books/$18

10:09 AM by kennyc in E-Book General | General Discussions

Google wins book-scanning case: judge finds “fair use,” cites many benefits
by Jeff John Roberts 2 HOURS AGO 1 Comment

SUMMARY:
The long-running copyright fight between Google and the Authors Guild is over: Judge Denny Chin issued a resounding ruling in favor of fair use.

Google has won a resounding victory in its eight-year copyright battle with the Authors Guild over the search giant’s controversial decision to scan more than 20 million books from libraries and make them available on the internet.

In a ruling (embedded below) issued Thursday morning in New York, US Circuit Judge Denny Chin said the book scanning amounted to fair use because it was “highly transformative” and because it didn’t harm the market for the original work.

“Google Books provides significant public benefits,” Chin wrote, describing it as “an essential research tool” and noting that the scanning service has expanded literary access for the blind and helped preserve the text of old books from physical decay.

Chin also rejected the theory that Google was depriving authors of income, noting that the company does not sell the scans or make whole copies of books available. He concluded, instead, that Google Books served to help readers discover new books and amounted to “new income from authors.”
...

http://gigaom.com/2013/11/14/google-...many-benefits/

CNET: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-576...-google-books/

04:20 PM by pdurrant in E-Book General | News

The Digital Reader reports that Amazon has just opened a Kindle store in Australia.

This gives Australians much easier access to Kindles and Kindle ebooks, as previously they had to order from Amazon.com and pay in US$.

06:11 AM by owly in E-Book General | News

Amazon appear to be negotiating with Swedish publishers about opening a Kindle store in Sweden.

Article in Dagens Nyheter, Swedens largest newspaper

Google translate into English of the article.

06:57 AM by pdurrant in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Just a reminder that if you want to buy Baen's December 2013 Bundle, six SF/Fantasy books for $18, you only have SIX days left to buy it. The bundle will come off sale sometime on the 15th November, and the full bundle can be downloaded by those who've bought it sometime from the 16th onwards.

The total cost of the individual books is about $57. So if you don't already have any of the books in the bundle, that's a discount of 68%!

The books in the December bundle are:

Mars, Inc. by Ben Bova
1920: America's Great War by Robert Conroy
Man-Kzin Wars XIV created by Larry Niven
Dragon's Teeth by Mercedes Lackey
Tiger by the Tail by John Ringo and Ryan Sear
Night and Demons by David Drake

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

What was going on this week at MobileRead? Here's your chance to catch-up if you missed something!

E-Book General - News

• Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 8.9" Wins Display Shoot-Out.
• onyx BOOX‘s new android eink reader C65HD/C65ML is for user testing now!
• Archive.org's scanning center destroyed by fire
• UK Ofcom report on online copyright infringement tracking

06:09 AM by sun surfer in E-Book General | News

Link

The report came out in September and uses information gathered from March-May 2013. Of particular interest here is the section on ebooks. I've only skimmed it so far so others may find other tidbits, but I found interesting that they estimate 1% of the (presumably UK) internet population download ebooks illegally.

They've also listed where respondents get their ebooks from, which gives the side effect of providing some info on ebook seller market shares in the UK (though I'm not certain exactly how accurate it is since it's respondents versus hard data, and it's not really shares since respondents could choose multiple answers). These estimates also include sites that can be used to acquire ebooks illegally, which give a very interesting view on the situation.

Here are the percentages of respondents who used the top services:

79% - Kindle (Amazon)
9% - ibookstore (Apple)
8% - Google search engine
6% - ebooks.com
6% - Google Play
5% - Email
5% - Kobo (WH Smith)
4% - Facebook
3% - (a particular grey site)
3% - Waterstones
(in grey) 7% - Peer-to-peer (net)
(in grey) 2% - Cyberlockers (net)

The last two are coloured differently presumably as they are conglomerates of various options that can be used for illegal acquisition, so at least 7% who download ebooks use those kind of sites.

10:54 AM by drjenkins in E-Book General | News

http://blog.archive.org/2013/11/06/s...-help-rebuild/

This morning at about 3:30 a.m. a fire started at the Internet Archive’s San Francisco scanning center. The good news is that no one was hurt and no data was lost.

They are looking for donations to replace the $600,000 worth of book, film and microfilm scanning equipment lost in the fire.