Tag: ebooks

Trivial Posts #18: A Block Of Time, A Book Of Delights, And A Picture Of You

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Since the last weekly newsletter I’ve been to San Francisco… and made it home again. Lots to cover this week, so without too much hesitation… What Have I Been Up To? Every time I decide to fly to America, something ‘big’ happens back home, and this week was no exception. A week of catching up with old friends and new companies in Silicon Valley clashed with the BBC saying something about how the UK Song for Europe was going to be selected. My thoughts on that are here (and you can catch up on all the continent’s Eurovision news through

The Nook price drop comes to America

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Following the success of the price cut on the eInk Nook readers in the UK (here’s my piece on Forbes about the matter), the US is getting a similar price cut. It’s only on the higher priced Nook Simple Touch Glowlight, so the obvious reason is this is a stock clearing exercise ahead of a new unit going on sale – and that matches up with the historical times of Barnes and Noble’s hardware releases. But I suspect that the UK sales figures of both the Nook, and the resulting increased eBook sales, after the price drop of the two

Hugh Walters, copyright, and the hole in 20th century literature

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I would love to read the books of Hugh Walters again – a science fiction writer I remember reading when I eight or nine years old. Unfortunately I have only two books on my shelf, and to buy any others I would be looking at hundreds of pounds because they are out of print and not in favour with anyone. You’d think with Kindle and eBooks this would be easily solved but no. Multiply my issue by millions of people, and you see that the ‘hole’ in mid-20th century literature that copyright has created (The Hole In Our Collective Memory

Is DRM Amazon’s last walled garden with eBooks?

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Kindle review takes a look at why DRM is still such a big thing in eBook markets: DRM means permanent lock-in. Once you get permanent lock-in, readers don’t switch. They don’t switch because the cost of switching is losing all existing books bought from the vendor. Readers are locked-in – once again at the mercy of Gatekeepers. Authors too are at the mercy of the new Gatekeepers. If people don’t leave the two biggest stores because of DRM related lock-in, then we’ve just replaced The Big Six with The Terrible Two. Authors have no means to get to readers without ‘pleasing’ these

British Library to put all non-copyrighted works online

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I don’t think there’s any other way to describe this than "win". The UK’s national library has clinched a deal with Google to include texts dating back to the 18th Century. The library’s collection includes around 14m books – second only to the USA’s Library of Congress – and it holds some 920,000 journal and newspaper titles. The deal with Google will enable readers to view, search and copy works – where the copyright has expired – at no charge. Google will also make the books available through its own portal. With all those texts online we’re sure to see