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 […]
eNews
A Glimpse of Small Demons at FBF
While high-profile Bookish is still working on going live, smaller start-up online discovery tool SmallDemons.com is unveiling itself in a couple of presentations at the Frankfurt Book Fair, as the service moves into the invitation-only beta stage. They expect to open to the public in mid-December. Small Demons is a new way of indexing and organizing full-text content from books. Instead of showing text snippets, their combination of algorithms and human editors organizes book content around people, places and things mentioned in each book. So when you look up an individual title, you see all the actual people mentioned; a […]
eNews: Kobo Pairs with Fnac in France; BlueFire Goes International; and More
Kobo has announced their next international ebook alliance, with France’s top bookselling chain Fnac. Set to launch “within the fourth quarter” of this year both online and in 81 Fnac stores, the bookseller has committed to having “ereading experts on hand to give personalized in-store demonstrations,” taking a cue from Barnes & Noble’s Nook boutiques. They promise “the largest catalog of ebooks in France” without specifying a number of titles on a platform that will be called “Kobo by Fnac.” (Amazon launched their Kindle store last week with about 35,000 titles in French. This time a year ago, Fnac said […]
Covering the Coverage of Publishers Launch Frankfurt
The Bookseller’s FutureBook has multiple reports from Monday’s day-long Publishers Launch Conference. This one is more of a summary while this piece focuses on the morning’s survey of ebook adoption in multiple markets globally, and the accompanying panel discussion including executives from Italy, Germany, Brazil and China. Their third focuses on the panel with agents David Miller at Rogers, Coleridge and White; Robert Gottlieb at Trident Media; Peter Fritz at Paul & Peter Fritz and Monica Martin at MB Agency. Miller reported seeing some “slippage” negotiating digital royalties above 25 percent (including escalators): “I’ve negotiated some better rates, and publishers are […]
eNews: Open Road Launches YA Original Title; Lerner Develops iPad App
Open Road is launching their first YA original for publication next February and it’s a work conceived and created especially for the digital medium, Andrea Buchanan’s paranormal ghost story GIFT. The full version–the full feature-set of which will work only on Apple’s platform, though more limited versions will work on other major platforms–includes such features as: audio tracks and music videos written and performed by one of the novel’s main characters (so the Booktrack-soundtrack idea, expanded); sound and visuals that “triggered” at key points in the story; a graphic novel created by one of the characters that is revealed throughout […]
Amazon Is Selling English Around the World, And Bringing the World to the US
While most countries around the world wait for substantial ebook markets to develop at home, the marketplaces developed by the big North American ebook players increasingly provide unexpectedly strong opportunities to sell ebooks in multiple languages. Amazon vp of Global Kindle Content Acquisition David Naggar addressed this opportunity with data at the Publishers Launch Conference on Monday. Addressing one of the issues raised in the morning panels, Naggar said they are indeed experiencing significant growth in selling English ebooks into translation territories as well. In countries where English is not the first language, Kindle’s year-to-date unit sales in 2011 have […]