eNews

Look, up on the interweb: it’s a video book, it’s a v-book, it’s a digi-novel. No, it’s a Vook, or rather four of them, in the first co-publishing partnership between entrepreneur and Turn Here founder Brad Inman’s new start-up Vook and Atria Books. Releasing Thursday and priced at $6.99, the two fiction and two nonfiction titles are meant to represent a range of experimentation with the form, which embeds original video clips within a browser-based version of a digital book. Titles will be sold through a dedicated section of S&S’s web site and Vook’s site, though the primary driver–and most […]

Matching the recent rollout from AT&T at Barnes & Noble stores, Borders will provide “virtually all of its more than 500 Borders stores” with free wi-fi from Verizon, “expected to be available by mid-October.” Users will start with a promotional Borders splash page.

Disney Publishing has launched a subscription-based web site that will present a broad catalog starting with about 500 electronic children’s books for readers ages 3 to 13. DisneyDigitalBooks.com is priced at $8.95 per month (or $79.95 annually), and offers a few free books for trial with registration. Disney Publishing president Russell Hampton tells the NYT, “We want to make reading an even bigger deal in a kid’s life, and if we can do that in a new and interactive way — great.” The paper says “a huge marketing effort will set about drilling the site into the public consciousness,” including […]

Sony has launched a Publisher Portal making their Reader eBook Store available to those who publish through ebook site Smashwords and self-publisher Author Solutions. Sony Portal

The judge has agreed to the request to not hold a full hearing on the proposed settlement on October 7 “as it does not appear that the current settlement will be the operative one.” But he doesn’t want to wait another month to learn the status of negotiations, as the Authors Guild and AAP had asked. At the October conference he wants “to determine how to proceed with the case as expeditiously as possible, as this case has now been pending for over four years.” While Chin will not hear from any other petitioners at the hearing, “they are free […]

IRex is providing additional details about their marketing of their new digital reader in the US this fall–which will be sold through Best Buy, where the NYT reports that the chain “is training thousands of its employees in how to talk about and demonstrate devices like the Sony Reader and iRex, and adding a new area to its 1,048 stores to showcase the devices.” Up until now, the retailer has sold ereaders online and only “in limited tests in stores.” Best Buy scp for entertainment says “we feel that this is a technology that is beginning to emerge and that […]