eNews

This morning Amazon announced a Canada-compliant Kindle is ready for immediate shipping. (Canada had been left aside at the initial release of the international version of Kindle.) As for other international customers, the units are priced in US dollars, and the promised “typical” low low price for new releases and Globe and Mail bestsellers is $11.99 “or less.” Amazon is offering Kindle version of the Globe and Mail and National Post, and will add Canwest’s top newspapers shortly.Release Separately, BN.com addressed a frequent complaint among their customers on one of their blogs yesterday. As of mid-December, they will start accepting […]

Following their sales partnership with BN.com, Smashwords has struck a partnership to supply their self-published and small publisher ebooks to Shortcovers as well. Smashwords says their authors and publishers will earn 46.75 percent of the digital list price on those sales. Separately, Scribd.com announced a deal to offer over 14,000 dissertations and theses from ProQuestUMI through their site. Selling at $49, they will pay 80 percent of the proceeds to ProQuest. Overall, Proquest has over 2 million dissertations and theses in its database.

Bowing to pressure from foreign governments and the Department of Justice, the revised Google Books Settlement agreement presented to the District Court shortly before midnight on Friday limits the scope of the scheme to works registered with the US Copyright Office and books published in the UK, Canada and Australia. As part of that change, the named plaintiffs have been expanded to include authors and publishers from those countries, and British, Australian and Canadian rightsholders will gain representation of the Book Rights Registry board. Expressing a less expansive view than he did a year ago when announcing the first settlement […]

B&H Publishing Group will launch a downloadable five dollar Xbox 360 application called Bible Navigator X in December featuring the complete Holman Christian Standard Bible. They say it is “thought to be the first complete Bible available on a video game console.” It includes search and bookmarking tools that are “designed for everyone, but particularly with youth ministers in mind.”More info Hachette Book Group has hired Tata Consultancy Services to take over day-to-day technology needs including application development and support and off-hours service. The larger point is to free HBG’s own IT staff to focus on innovation and expansion of […]

Amazon has launched their Kindle for PC application, and still promises a Mac version coming soon. It ties in to the launch of Windows 7 and is designed to use certain capabilities in the new software, though it also works with Windows XP and Vista. Given the size of that platform, the new app could do far more than the international Kindle to make Kindle files available throughout the world. Separately, Wired observes: “But the thing that intrigues us is the screenshot above (along with more on the Amazon site) which shows a book with color illustrations. This may mean […]

Judge Denny Chin agreed to the request of the plaintiffs attorneys to wait until “no later than” Friday, November 13 for the submission of a revised settlement agreement. They write that they met with the Department of Justice “as recently as this past Friday” and “the parties have been working diligently” on the revised agreement.