Building on our report from Friday, Barnes & Noble has indeed announced a press event on the morning of November 7 featuring “a very special announcement,” widely expected to unveil their latest ereading tablet. Separately, at the company’s annual meeting last week, the company confirmed the other piece of information cited from the Digital Reader: the company is doubling the size of the Nook boutiques in 40 of their “most productive stores” to 2,000 square feet of space, presumably to feature those new devices. Riverrun Bookstore will not renew the lease at its current location in Portsmouth, NH, set to […]
eReaders
eNews: WSJ Adds eBook Bestseller List, Compiled By Nielsen; Amazon in Talks for Kindle in China; and More
Starting tomorrow, the WSJ’s Weekend edition will feature their own ebook bestseller lists. Like the NYT lists, the Journal will present both ebook-only lists for fiction and nonfiction, as well as combined print and ebook lists in both categories. All titles are eligible–self-published, children’s, backlist, etc.–as long as they have a minimum price of 99 cents or higher. Nielsen BookScan is aggregating the data for the WSJ, drawing on what the release calls “all major retailers,” said to include Amazon, Nook, iBookstore, Sony and Google eBooks among others. Like the other WSJ charts, the new lists will be positional only, […]
eNews: Kobo’s Tablet, Berkley/NAL’s Digital Imprint, S&S’s Author Portal, 11 Million iPads, Google’s Bookshelf, and More
Kobo is joining the ereader/tablet movement with their just-announced Vox, dubbed “the People’s eReader.” Selling for $199.99 and shipping as of October 28, it runs Android 2.3 and promises easy web browsing, e-mail, and access to “over 15,000 hot music, video and game apps.” It weighs 14.2 ounces (lighter than Nook Color or Kindle Fire), and a vibrating Kobo pulse icon signifies pages with more social activity. Kobo says it comes with three free color ebooks. Berkley/NAL has announced a digital imprint (actually they call it an “e-initial eBook imprint”) launching in January 2012, InterMix. The line will debut with […]
WHSmith Team Up With Kobo As They Report Full Year Sales Decline on Rising Profits
As Kobo continues to expand its reach around the world, they have now found a UK retailer to sell its ereader and ebook offerings: WHSmith announced Wednesday they have teamed up with Kobo as the “perfect partner” for ebooks. They will sell the Wi-Fi ereader for £89.99 (and the Kobo Touch for £109.99) and offer the more than 2.2 million ebooks for sale from Kobo’s catalog. Previously WHSmith’s ebookstore was powered by Overdrive. WHSmith also reported their annual earnings for the year ending August 31 Wednesday, with overall sales down 3 percent to £1.273b on a 5 percent rise in […]
Bowker Details 10-Country eBook Survey, and More eNews
As previewed at Monday’s Publishers Launch Conference, on Wednesday Bowker announced full details on the expansion of their consumer research into ebooks beyond the US and UK. They will conduct a new annual study, starting in January 2012 (for presentation in March), to chart the state of consumer ebook and ereading device use and acceptance around the world. They will gather additional data samples from Germany, France, Spain, India, Australia, Brazil, South Korea and Japan, in collaboration with companies including A.T. Kearney, the Book Industry Study Group, Pearson and Tata Consultancy Services. In other enews, Ectaco is demonstrating their JetBook Color […]
Amazon Opens Kindle Store in France
Amazon has opened a Kindle store in France at Amazon.fr with more than 35,000 titles in French (and 800,000 more, primarily in English), a French-language version of its budget Kindle for 99 Euros, and the introduction of local Kindle Direct Publishing. The store will also offer graphic novels, more than 4000 free French classics, and top French newspapers. It is their second Kindle store in a language other than English, following the German store they opened in April. “French customers are passionate about books and reading, and just as we’ve seen in the US, UK and Germany, we believe they […]