eNews

The 12 US universities comprising the Committee on Institutional Cooperation have joined with the University of California’s library system to a single repository of their respective collections of digital materials in an entity called HathiTrust. Associate university librarian of the University of Michigan John Wilkin is executive director of the organization. On the one hand it provides a non-profit counterpart to the materials within Google Book Search, but on the other hand it potentially raises a new set of concerns for publishers. Currently they say they repository has almost 2 million volumes (largely the result of Google’s scanning), of which […]

Newsweek’s staff has prepared biographies of the four presidential and vice presidential campaigns (titled Mr. Cool, Mr. Hot, The Insider, and The Outsider) and will sell them as Kindle exclusives, available on October 15. The release says that “Newsweek is the first periodical to publish a collection of coverage as an e-book on Kindle.”

Simon & Schuster is making over 500 hundred titles available for sale on Internet-enabled mobile devices through MPS’s Mobile Global Reader. The company say “the full Simon & Schuster eBook catalog will be made available in the coming months.”  In advance of the show, the Frankfurt Book Fair has released the results of a survey of over 1,000 publishing professionals from more than 30 countries. The results are inadvertently perfect in capturing the industry’s digital dichotomy: 70 percent of the responds say they “feel ready for the digital challenge” while 60 percent do not use ereaders or read ebooks in […]

Are Kindle and Sony Reader lifting all e-reading boats? Ingram Digital says that third quarter downloads were “more than double the same quarter last year.” The company says they currently offer over 130,000 ebook titles from more than 1,100 publishers. They cover a wide variety of formats and devices: “PCs, PDAs, dedicated e-book readers, Smartphones, and with the eReader format, directly to iPhones.” They support five major formats: Adobe e-books as PDF and EPUB files, MS Reader, eReadr, and Vitalbooks. Value Chain International‘s book preview widget has been adopted by Taylor an Francis (which will deploy the facility for over […]

As we’ve pointed out previously, Sony sells their Reader in more markets than Amazon’s Kindle, and has been equally reluctant to disclose any data about sales. In the flurry of stories following the announcement of their new model, president of their Digital Reading Business Steve Haber does tell the San Diego paper, “we’ve sold hundreds of thousands of Readers and millions of electronic books.” The paper says Haber “takes exception to recent published reports that said the Reader sales are only a fraction” of the wild guesses about Kindle sales. SD Union Tribune Speaking of Amazon, The Register notes that […]