Archive for the ‘eBook Stores’ Category
Overstock selling Nook Books no comments
Thanks to a partnership with Barnes & Noble, Overstock is now selling Nook Books via a new ebookstore powered by B&N. Overstock claims to be the number one seller of refurbished Nook Color ereaders, which it has been selling for awhile.
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Google Books now accepting pre-orders no comments
One feature that was lacking in the Google eBookstore was the ability to pre-order an upcoming title. That has been remedied and you can now order titles before their release. Customer’s credit cards are not charged until the ebook is released and a notification is sent out letting purchasers know that their ebook is ready for download.
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A new $15 per month PD ebook and audiobook service no comments
AllYouCanBooks.com is a new subscription service that gives you unlimited access to a collection of 30,000 public domain ebooks and downloadable audiobooks. The charge for all this goodness is $14.99 per month.
There is no reason to pay someone $15 per month for access to these titles. They are widely available for free. It may be worthwhile to pay something for a PD title if the formatting has been cleaned up and a nice cover provided, but there is no mention of that being done here. I also have no problem with paying for an author’s complete collected works, as it is often more convenient than tracking down everything.
See the eBook Sources page for free sources for these books. If you want to pay something for them, donate $15 per month to Project Gutenberg. For audio versions, see LibriVox, which has a number of free audiobook versions of the classics that have been read by volunteers.
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Google ebooks now available in Australia no comments
Yesterday the Google eBookstore launched an Australian branch. Local brick and mortar bookstores that will also be offering the Google eBooks via their websites include Booktopia and Dymocks.
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Google eBooks now available to Canadian readers no comments
Google has launched a Canadian branch of the Google eBooks store. Google has partnered with both Canadian and international publishers and the Canadian store launches with hundreds of thousands of paid titles in addition to a couple million free public domain titles. Google eBooks will also be available through some Canadian booksellers such as Campus eBookstore and McNally Robinson.
Google eBooks should work on any device that can read ePub with Adobe DRM, including tablets and various dedicated ereaders.
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Google eBooks now available in UK no comments
The Google eBookstore has just opened its virtual doors to customers in the UK. Readers in the UK can now purchase Google eBooks and read them on any device that is compatible with Adobe Digital Editions. As in the US, brick and mortar bookstores will also be able to sell Google eBooks — Blackwell’s will be one of the Google eBookstore’s affiliate partners.
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Google adapts to Apple’s rules no comments
Tonight Google sent out an email pertaining to Google Books on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. While purchasing ebooks from the Google eBookstore from within the Google Books iOS app is no longer possible thanks to Apple’s current rules (which would require Google to pay Apple 30 percent of all in-app sales), by following the instructions in the email you can install an icon on your homescreen that will take you directly to the Google bookstore via Safari:
- Open your Safari web browser
- Go to the address: books.google.com/ebooks
- Tap the bookmark symbol at the top (box with an outgoing arrow)
- Tap "Add to Home Screen"
- Tap "Add"
- To shop at the Google eBookstore, simply tap the bookstore icon. Any ebooks you purchase or download will automatically appear in your Google Books app for you to read.
Any ebooks you purchase will show up in your Google Books library on your iOS device or any Android devices you might have. Of course there is nothing groundbreaking here — you can add a bookmark to any Web page to the homescreen of your iPad or iPhone in the same manner.
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Sony to launch European Reader Stores no comments
Sony announced today that it will be expanding its ebookstore to Europe. The first new store will launch in the UK with over 100,000 titles by the end of October, 2011. This will be followed by a Reader Store serving German and Austrian customers by the end of this year. Next year Reader Stores will be coming to France, Italy and Spain.
Here’s hoping that Sony does a better job with its European ebookstores than it has with the US version.
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Diesel eBook Store forms partnership with Macmillan no comments
The Diesel eBook Store has formed a direct partnership with Macmillan that will enable the ebook merchant to sell the publisher’s titles directly through
its online store, rather than use third-party distributers for encryption and fulfillment as it has done in the past.
From the press release:
Under the terms of the agreement, Diesel will store the digital titles of Macmillan on its own servers and provide fulfillment and encryption on orders through Adobe Content Server 4 (ACS4). A new proprietary PubDesk interface, through which the publisher can access its inventory, run reports and modify its metadata, has been created and will launch shortly.
"We are so thrilled to be working with the prestigious publisher Macmillan directly since they represent many top-notch authors that our customers love to read – authors such as Lora Leigh, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Lisa Kleypas, Robert Jordan, Orson Scott Card, Robert A. Heinlein and Jonathan Franzen, just to name a few.”
The Diesel eBook Store launched its new eBook retailing platform in December 2010 and is unique in the marketplace for their expanded categories and their ability to host customer created bundles. Their new site also boosts a suite of new features such as the “Deal of the Day”, social networking , video integration, access to over two million free eBooks via partnerships with Google and Smashwords and a new and improved search engine.
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Kindle Singles arrive no comments
Just over three months ago Amazon announced a new section coming to the Kindle Store – Kindle Singles – that would take advantage of one of the unique benefits of digital publishing.
Traditional publishing requires a work to be of at least a certain length to be financially viable to print as a book. This means that in many cases where an idea could be succinctly conveyed in a shorter piece it instead gets bloated with repetition and endless examples in order to create a work that is long enough to be financially viable to be printed as a paper book (did The Long Tail seem a tad too long to you too?).
The alternative to this is to print a shorter piece as part of a collection or in a periodical, which may not reach as large an audience as it would if the piece were presented independently in a book. With ebooks, of course, there are no such restraints.
Today Amazon announced that the new Kindle Singles section of the Kindle Store is now open. The shorts in the new section will be priced between $0.99 and $4.99. They can be read on a Kindle ereader or with one of the Kindle apps.
From the press release:
Before the advent of digital reading, writers often had to choose between making their work short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the "heft" required for book marketing and distribution. Three months ago, Amazon made a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Kindle in making a new kind of content available to readers–Kindle Singles. Typically between 5,000 and 30,000 words, each Kindle Single is intended to allow a single killer idea — well researched, well argued and well illustrated — to be expressed at its natural length.
"The response to our announcement of Singles has been great," said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. "This first set of Singles was selected by our team of editors, and includes works by Rich Cohen, Darin Strauss, Ian Ayres, and the first-ever books published by TED. We think customers will be riveted by these stories that can take them to a Swedish bank heist or to the Mexican border town of Juarez, or to consider a new way to think about happiness."
Kindle Singles launches with 22 titles, including the following, with more to be added over time:
- Lifted by Evan Ratliff (34 pages, $1.99): The thieves had a handpicked crew, a stolen helicopter, a cache of explosives, and a plan to rob a $150 million cash repository. The Stockholm police had a tip-off. Wired and New Yorker writer Evan Ratliff recounts the inside story of an audacious 2009 bank heist, and the race to solve it. This is an inaugural title from publisher The Atavist.
- The Happiness Manifesto by Nic Marks (40 pages, $2.99): Modern research proves the ancient wisdom that "money can’t buy you happiness." But then why do our governments see their main task as simply growing GDP? Marks, founder of the London-based Centre for Well-Being, sets out an ingenious new way of defining national goals–and in the process reveals five ways people can nurture their own happiness. One of the inaugural TEDBooks.
- Piano Demon by Brendan I. Koerner (37 pages, $1.99): At age six, Teddy Weatherford was working in a Virginia coal mine. Two decades later, he was the jazz king of Asia. Koerner, a Wired contributing editor and author of "Now The Hell Will Start," tells how a piano legend in a sharkskin suit lived the American Dream by leaving it behind.
- Leaving Home by Jodi Picoult (43 pages, $2.99): The deep pains and powerful pleasures of parenting: those are the extremes explored here by the extraordinary novelist Jodi Picoult. In three short pieces that display her wide emotional range, Picoult weaves together stories of love and loss with heartbreaking simplicity.
- The Dead Women of Juarez by Robert Andrew Powell (31 pages, $1.99): It sounded like one of the great murder mysteries of our time: who was killing the women of Juarez? Journalist Robert Andrew Powell went to the Mexican border town to investigate, and separates fact from myth in a saga that eerily echoes the plot of Roberto Bolaño’s epic novel "2666".
- Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks by Sebastian Rotella/ProPublica (38 pages, $.99): The U.S. investigation of the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai provides a detailed picture of the ties between Pakistan’s intelligence service and a leading militant group. The latest reporting from ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
- The $500 Diet by Ian Ayres (39 pages, $2.99): When Yale law professor Ayres vowed to drop his weight from 205 pounds to 180 pounds, he put his money where his mouth was — literally. It was either lose the weight, or pay the price. A look into Ayres’ weight-loss method through simple financial incentive.
- Darkstar by Christopher R. Howard (44 pages, $2.99): A pre-apocalyptic love story. Sailor, a homeless Irish teenager who’s haunted by a diabolical voice, seeks to reunite with a soulmate he hasn’t seen since boyhood, as a cosmic event threatens to extinguish life on Earth. Howard’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, and his first novel, "Tea of Ulaanbaatar," comes out this May.
- Homo Evolutis by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans (58 pages, $2.99): Enriquez and Gullans–two eminent authors, researchers, and entrepreneurs–explore a world where humans increasingly shape their environment, their own selves and other species. They envision a future in which humankind becomes a new species — one which directly and deliberately controls its own evolution and that of many other species. One of the inaugural TEDBooks.
£149.00
£109
