eNews

Posted on the Automat last week but worth a little more attention on this quiety day, Google posted on their public policy blog regarding the pending settlement of the GBS lawsuits. “As ‘parent’ rightsholders claim their books through the Book Rights Registry, we think it will become clear that most out-of-print books are not actually ‘orphans.’… Furthermore, many books that some think are in-copyright orphans (including a large percentage from 1963 or before) are actually out-of-copyright, and Google is working to make more information available that can clarify their copyright status.” But they say they continue to support orphan works […]

For Google’s planned initiative to sell access to online (and browser-cached) versions of books starting later this year, the company tells the Wall Street Journal they reserve the right to discount ebook prices at their own expense, though publishers will set the list prices. Publishers have told us that the splits Google has been proposing for the direct sale of ebooks more or less mimics the 37/63 split for out-of-print books in the proposed settlement of the Google Book Search lawsuits. But the effort to enable sale through other online retailers that we described on Monday is positioned as requiring […]

Following Cool-er’s noisy launch at BEA, we’ve been trying to clarify some of the operational details about the start-up. Their e-store, which claims to have “over 750,000 titles,” is driven by Ingram Digital, at least for the paid downloads. Founder Neil Jones told us he “can’t formally comment on the public domain titles right now” because agreements are still being formalized, and said the same with respect to partnerships with suppliers in other territories. Leaving aside public domain titles, Jones says they have “about 260,000 ebooks” available–but “what is the number of actual of titles is questionable.” That’s because the […]

At BEA we had a chance to check out the BeBook e-reader, produced in Holland and headed for distribution in the US market. CEO Johan Hagenbeuk said that he is having discussions with a number of potential partners, including both major retailers and publishers themselves. While his line of devices offers prices competitive to Cool-er (and less than Sony Reader and Kindle), he’s looking to encourage cellphone-style service models that subsidize the price of the reader in exchange for a contract to buy a certain amount of content. Hagenbeuk suggested that he company is very close to launching a simple […]

Taiwan company Pixel Qi now has a demonstration video of what some people see as the next big innovation in screen technology. It’s an LCD screen that has electronic paper qualities and can display three different ways. As PC World describes it, it has “a black-and-white e-ink mode for reading text documents and e-books, and two color modes, designed for use indoors or in bright sunlight, that are more suitable for Web surfing and video playback. E-ink mode extends battery life by shutting off the backlight, and is intended for reading e-books, documents, Web sites or blogs and other text-based […]