Earlier this year when the University of Michigan announced that they would sell over 400,000 public domain books scanned from their collection in a partnership with BookSurge/Amazon, they made it clear this first agreement was a nonexclusive relationship. Now Hewlett Packard has officially announced their BookPrep service, which prepares scanned books for print-on-demand and online viewing, which even includes “a rich set of predefined cover templates.” The University of Michigan is one of HP’s partners, helping to drive the availability for sale of almost 500,000 public domain books and counting. HP says their process “significantly drives down the cost of […]
eNews
Briefs: Target Joins Price War, and BN Prepares Nook
A couple of noteworthy but ultimately short stories. Target joined the pre-order bestseller price war, though in more limited fashion. They’re matching Walmart.com’s $8.99 offer with free shipping included, but on just six November pre-order titles. Boulder Bookstore buyer Arsen Kashkashian has suggested via Twitter that fellow indies cancel their publisher pre-orders on these deep-discounted forthcoming titles and take advantage of their competitors’ loss leaders. Bookstores will save money, he reasons, while helping Amazon and Walmart.com lose more. And Barnes & Noble’s afternoon media event suffered another pre-announcement leak–this time from the bookseller itself. An ad in next Sunday’s NYT […]
Internet Archive Proposes Universal Book Search Plan
Searching for and within books on the internet is pretty much of a mess right now, and only getting messier. While Google aspires to serve and protect everyone’s ebook files from the cloud some day, so far even the search giant has favored the proprietary rules of Google Book Search over truly becoming the “Google of book search.” Into that void steps one of Google’s primary antagonists of the moment, the Internet Archive. Leapfrogging their own work-in-progress database the Open Library, the IA has been debuting their concept for BookServer, envisioned as “a new architecture using common open standards that […]
Another Week of eNouncements
As Kindle International starts shipping, Plastic Logic issue a vapor release telling the world that they will finally announce pricing and confirm productions details on their new e-reader January 7 at the Consumer Electronics Show. In the meantime, they have given It a name: “Que” (full name: Que proReader.) AT&T is their wireless service provider. iRex announced that they are working with NewspaperDirect and LibreDigital to make a wealth of newspapers and magazines available–both as single copies as well as by subscription–on their about-to-release unit. North American ceo Kevin Hamilton tells PaidContent about a third strategy they are working on, […]
Amazon Adds Same-Day Delivery; Removes Kindle Data API
Amazon announced same-day delivery of assorted products in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Las Vegas, and Seattle. More quietly, and to everyone’s detriment, the etailer confirmed on a forum recently that the data API for Kindle books isn’t broken–it has been removed for good. The post simply states: “We apologize for the confusion surrounding Kindle Books. Kindle books are not available via the Product Advertising API.” What that means is that informational services for searching Amazon’s database (of which our own Amazoom is just one) no longer show any Kindle availability or data. It also means everything about […]
Library eBook Lending Rises, As Publishers Wonder About the Terms
Following up on Barnes & Noble’s hope to allow limited “lending” of ebooks by customers, the NYT looks at the growing demand for library patrons “checking out” downloadable ebooks from public library web sites. Overdrive says their number of checkouts has passed 1 million so far this year, up from abou 600,000 for all of last year. Of course those downloads don’t work on many of the most popular platforms, like Kindle and iPhone. But publishers are increasingly concerned about the business terms as ebook adoption grows. Simon & Schuster spokesman Adam Rothberg says, “We have not found a business […]