The WSJ columnist has been testing Indigo’s new iPhone ereading offering, Shortcovers: “At Shortcovers is the more ambitious and creative of the two. launch, it expects to have 200,000 shortcovers — chapters or other free excerpts — available. About 50,000 of these also will be available for purchase as full digital titles; the rest can be ordered as physical books. Of the digital titles, roughly 15,000 to 20,000 will be older or public-domain books, and the rest commercial books. Typical book prices will be between $10 and $20. If you want to buy paid shortcovers — say a chapter of […]
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HBG Cuts Off eBook Wholesalers Over Territorial Enforcement
Also from the epublishing world, TeleRead first reported that over the weekend Hachette Book Group pulled its titles from a number of ebook wholesalers–including Ingram Digital, Overdrive, Mobipocket Paris, and BooksonBoard–over longstanding concerns about the enforcement and verifiable reporting of territorial rights provisions to the publisher. HBG’s Maja Thomas confirms the report for Lunch, noting that this has been “an ongoing issue; we’re not an isolated publisher” in dealing the problem. She underscores that “we’re not trying to restrict stales that are legitimate” and “we want the ebook economy to be robust.” At the same time, in its units throughout […]
Author Solutions Buys Xlibris
Author Solutions, which already gobbled up competitor iUniverse, has now acquired Xlibris, too. The company says the combined lists now comprise almost 100,000 titles from 70,000 authors. CEO Kevin Weiss says “Xlibris brings a demonstrated expertise in marketing services, which perfectly complements the strength of AuthorHouse’s publishing and illustration services and iUniverse’s industry-leading editorial services. Both first-time and mid-list authors, writing in all genres, will find one of our brands offers the services they need to accomplish their publishing goals.” The addition brings takes their annual title count from about 12,000 up to 19,000, and still growing. Random House was […]
Indigo Launches Mobile Reading Initiative at CES
Canadian retailing giant Indigo is launching Shortcovers, their effort to stake out a dominant place in the “app-world” reading market, at the Consumer Electronics show. Launching in the US at the end of this month and in Canada shortly thereafter, the start-up is leveraging parent company Indigo’s relationships with publishers. (In a video interview with USA Today shown on the Shortcovers site, company cto Michael Serbinis has Marley & Me and The Snowball currently on his iPhone.) The system promises Kindlesque ease and variety of free sample chapters from books, along with other reading material including articles, news stories, speeches, […]
One Dollar Ebooks
Orbit has launched a promotional program offering a different book each month, selling for just one dollar each. Vendors include Amazon and Sony, along with Stanza, eReader, Fictionwise, Diesel, and MobiPocket. This month’s offering is Brent Weeks’ debut THE WAY OF THE SHADOWS. Publisher Tim Holman says: “We believe that this promotion will give readers a great opportunity to discover new writers. Most of our consumer marketing has an online focus, and the digital marketplace offers the perfect platform for price-promotion initiatives such as this…. The range of titles chosen for the promotion includes a mix of frontlist and backlist, […]
A Bland Review of the Google Settlement
The NYT has a piece that explains how Google has been scanning millions of books “that had been locked away on the dusty shelves of libraries and in antiquarian bookstores.” With a legal settlement awaiting approval by the court, “just what kind of commercial opportunity the settlement represents is unknown, but few expect it to generate significant profits for any individual author. Even Google does not necessarily expect the book program to contribute significantly to its bottom line.” AAP chairman Richard Sarnoff comments, “I think there will be a few authors who do see significant dollars out of this, but […]