This week Adams Media published Newsday sportswriter Alan Hahn’s BRUIN REDEMPTION: THE STANLEY CUP RETURNS TO BOSTON as a $7.99 ebook after a 72-hour turnaround time. The publisher said they had the book “within hours” of the Bruins’ Stanley Cup win on June 15. Powell’s director of strategic planning Darin Sennett talks with Seattle Business Journal about the bookstore’s previously announced mobile app, now set to launch in full by the end of the summer. OverDrive will now supply ebooks to Easons, making the bookstore chain the first OverDrive partner to offer EPUB and PDF eBook content directly to Irish […]
eNews
Announcements: New Funding for Osprey, John Locke’s a Kindle Millionaire
Osprey Group announced it has received new funding from London private equity firm Alcuin Capital Partners, providing additional expansion capital to continue Osprey’s strong growth in niche and enthusiast market segments. With the investment, Alcuin acquires a controlling interest in Osprey but the company’s existing majority shareholder Botts Capital Nominees will remain a significant minority shareholder going forward. Self-published thriller phenomenon John Locke is the latest (and eighth) author to sell more than a million Kindle ebooks. Release The British Library has signed a multi-year deal that will allow Google to scan more than 250,000 out-of-copyright works from 1700 to […]
eNews: Google Affiliate Program; Success of Book Apps; and More
After launching the program in limited beta last December, Google eBooks’ affiliate program is seemingly ready for prime time. The program is only open to “Retailers, bloggers, book publishers and other website owners in the U.S.,” and no specific commission rates are cited, but they will have access to Google’s affiliate network and to APIs for more specifically targeted programs. Inside Google Books Blog The jury still seems to be out on the effectiveness of book apps, though two of them merited attention at Thursday’s Futurebook Innovation Workshop conference in London. UK studio Ustwo said its Nursery Rhymes With StoryTime […]
Harry Potter Portal “Pottermore” Gears Up for Launch
With the final Harry Potter movie releasing in exactly a month, an online promotion challenged Harry Potter fans to decode the name of a new Potter-related website: Pottermore.com. The tease has led to all kinds of unbridled speculation. The folks at fan site The Leaky Cauldron have seen the site and say “it is, in a word, breathtaking. That is all we are permitted to say at the moment.” (And they understood it’s not a new book, even though a lot of fans are not listening.) Take note that the Pottermore name was trademarked by Warner Bros. in mid-2009. The […]
eNews: Raccah on What Sells Digitally and Physically; OverDrive Announcements; and More
In a data-drive blog post Sourcebooks ceo Dominique Raccah underscores that fiction is disproportionately dominating ebook bestseller charts as well as her company’s digital sales. While well over half of Sourcebooks’ print sales come from adult nonfiction, over 80 percent of their ebook sales are from fiction. “Right now we’re seeing relatively weak conversion of adult non-fiction to ebooks,” Raccah writes. While reference is the single largest category within nonfiction, she says “our experience at Sourcebooks is that it’s the hardest category to get right in ebooks.” Which is ironic, since epublishing and the internet were widely expected to eliminate many […]
eNews: OverDrive Windows Phone App; Booksurfers for Kindle
Today’s eNews is decidedly app-centric, for devices bearing no relation whatsoever to Apple. Overdrive announced its Windows Phone app, enabling readers at the more than 15,000 services that use Overdrive to download EPUB ebooks and audiobooks. Overdrive Windows Phone app page Children’s author David Gatward’s new series Booksurfers, which mixes well-known stories with new adventures in an interactive manner, will be available exclusively at Amazon on various Kindle platforms starting today. Starting with the first two titles, TREASURE ISLAND and THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ, the series features four children who are “forced to jump ‘into’ classic adventure stories to […]