For some time now we’ve known that the digital textbook market, or more broadly speaking the educational market as far as it pertains to digital publishing, is something of a case unto itself, with...
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Information about digital book content, software and hardware.
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Chuck Hitchcock
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There has been a massive leak of internal documents today from Barnes and Noble that claim Microsoft has made a one billion dollar offer to buy the entire Nook brand. This includes all the ebooks, tablets, and e-readers that the company currently offers.
Barnes and Noble has sold over 10 million Nook devices since first launching in 2009. Over 7 million people are actively using the eBook Store, downloading apps, or purchasing television and movies. It is no secret that Barnes and Noble is losing money with losses of $262 million for the fiscal 2012 year. B&N is also projected to lose an additional $360 million in 2013, so things look dire.
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Google and the Authors Guild are wrangling in court again, with the latter asking for $3 billion in damages related to Google's digital books project. Lawyers for the two companies on Wednesday presented their oral arguments in an appeal hearing related to class action status for the suit. A judge in the Second Circuit Court in New York last year had granted the Authors Guild the ability to sue Google as a group, but the search giant on Wednesday argued that such status shouldn't be granted.
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The IDPF is holding a two day event before the main Book Expo America Starts in late may. This is a major digital publishing event featuring the who’s who of the ebook, e-reader, and self-publishing world. The main speaker list has been finalized and one of the new executives to lead a session is Otis Chandler, Co-founder and CEO of Goodreads. He will share an update and tackle questions from the crowd, including: What’s next for Goodreads now that it’s owned by Amazon? What does the recent sale mean for the 17 million members, 530 million books and 23 million reviews? Delete the scoop?
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New York and London – May 3, 2013 – NOOK Media LLC, a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today announced it is expanding its extensive catalogue of reading and entertainment content with the addition of the Google Play digital content experience on its acclaimed NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ devices. With Google Play on NOOK HD and NOOK HD+, customers will now have access to more than 700,000 Android apps and games, millions of songs and more. Barnes & Noble’s highly acclaimed lightweight high-definition 7- and 9-inch tablets will also include popular Google services like the Chrome browser, Gmail, YouTube, Google Search and Google Maps. Delete the scoop?
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According to new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, parents see libraries as very important community resources. Libraries’ digital books and technologies are a major draw for families.
Parents value libraries for their full spectrum services “from traditional stuff like books in stacks and comfortable reading spaces to high-tech kiosks and more e-books and mobile apps,” says Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet Project. Libraries’ digital offerings are key resources for parents and children.
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The Federal Trade Commission has issued some “Frequently Asked Questions” about the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) based on amended rules that go into effect on July 1st. Click here to see the FAQ.
Chuck Hitchcock's insight:
I will be interesting to see if COPPA applies to information collected by publishers from eBooks that are in use by young readers. Delete the scoop?
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The ugly non-secret of ebooks is that they look different on all different platforms. Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Kobo and others. If you want to know what your epubs will look like in the wild, I recommend the following tips and (free!) tools. When we test EPUB outputs at PressBooks, we usually go through the testing process in roughly this order, using these tools. Delete the scoop?
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What would happen if Amazon gave every nearly book in its system away for free for three days? That’s what two of the leading bookstores in China did this past week.
Last Wednesday through Friday, Dangdang.com offered “nearly all of its ebooks for free,” according to China.org.cn.
Competitor Jingdong — subject of today’s feature story “Jingdong Battles Dangdang, Amazon for China’s Online Book Buyers” — was quick to match the offer, saying they were giving some 50,000 titles away for free.
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The Kobo Aura HD was first announced on April 15th at the London Book Fair and the company announced that it will begin rolling it out to all retail locations by April 25th. This e-Reader bypassed the companies normal product release cycle, of September and October for most of their new gadgets. So what prompted them to release a new digital reader when the Mini, Arc and Glo was just just announced late September 2012? The Answer is quite surprising.
Barnes and Noble had been working with e-Ink Holdings to develop a followup to their year old Nook Simple Touch Reader with Glowlight. Close to 300,000 e-Readers were originally manufactured and earmarked for Barnes and Noble, but Kobo swooped in when the deal fell through to get a new product out the door
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H2O is a suite of online classroom tools developed and provided by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Library. H2O allows professors to freely develop, remix, and share online textbooks under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License (per the Terms of Service). Delete the scoop?
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OverDrive, the leading distributor of eBooks and audiobooks for libraries, schools and booksellers worldwide, announced today that during the first three months of 2013 it added a record number of new eBook and audiobook publishers, authors and titles to its global distribution catalog. With a catalog well over one million titles, OverDrive provides publishers unmatched discovery, marketing, and sales opportunities to a growing global network of millions of readers through leading booksellers, device manufacturers, as well as 22,000 schools and libraries. Delete the scoop?
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Bookboard is a new digital subscription service that streams children’s books to the iPad.
My boys and I have been testing it for about a month. Bookboard provides us with a steady supply of new storybooks at bedtime. It employs gamification elements to keep my seven year old son motivated to keep reading on his own. And it has caused me to reflect on the experience of reading to my kids on a tablet.
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“The hallmark of a webtext is interaction on every page … All that interaction causes students to read closely, reflect and analyze, and read until they attain mastery.” Delete the scoop?
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Though Apple's taken strides with iBooks's interface and store, the Kindle app remains a very fine alternative. Delete the scoop?
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Last year at this time, the most popular price point for self-published authors using the Smashwords distribution platform was $0.99; this year it's $2.99, Delete the scoop?
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Baker and Taylor has the 3rd largest market share for companies who facilitate digital ebook delivery in their libraries. Today, the company is making the process of reading easier with its new axisReader apps for iOS and Android.
The new axisReader apps allow you to borrow and read books within a singular app from your local library. You can read them in PDF or EPUB formats, as well as highlight, bookmark, annotate, or look up a definition. The new app will allow patrons to tap into a huge ecosystem of 450,000 titles, including digital audiobooks. 
Chuck Hitchcock's comment,
May 9, 10:41 AM
It was not a good sign to discover that the manual provided by B&T could not be read by VoiceOver on the iPad.
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Research by an Indiana State University doctoral student found that students did equally well on a test whether reading from a digital book or a printed one.
Jim Johnson, who also is director of instructional and information technology services in the Bayh College of Education, surveyed more than 200 students. Half of the students used an iPad2 to read a textbook chapter while the other half of the students read from a printed textbook chapter. The students then took an open-book quiz with eight easy and eight moderate questions on the chapter. Delete the scoop?
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Washington’s community colleges have expanded a program that is creating low-cost digital textbooks and curricula for the state’s most popular courses.
The project, called the Open Course Library, has employed dozens of Washington community-college faculty members to create textbooks and other curriculum materials for 81 of the most commonly taken community-college classes — like psychology, biology and precalculus. The materials are freely available and open to anyone, not just students in this state. Delete the scoop?
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Book publishing used to be a labor-intensive occupation, full of tedium and repetition, but such drudgery could be a thing of the past, thanks to a new system called Leanpub, with which we’ve just published our latest title: “Take Control of Dropbox.” Leanpub relies on a number of key tools — the Markdown language, Dropbox, LaTeX, CSS, and a Web-based interface — to enable a quick and efficient book publishing workflow Delete the scoop?
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E-book reading is becoming more common, and one way publishers are trying to take advantage of the growth in the use of digital readers is by plumbing their backlists, refurbishing classic and forgotten literature with new digital editions. But how much backlist is still there for the picking? As it turns out, a fair amount, especially in the case of nonfiction.
Looking through PW’s archives at the top 25 bestselling books of both 1992 and 1982 in fiction and nonfiction (100 titles total), we found 56 books that had Kindle e-book editions. Between fiction and nonfiction, the former fared much better: 39 of the 50 fiction titles had e-book editions, compared to 17 of the 50 nonfiction titles.
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Standalone e-book readers—Nooks, Kindles, and their ilk—are plummeting in sales; only a third as many Americans will buy one this year as did in 2011, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. That only confirms that a rise in "e-reading" on tablet and smart phones is killing the need for dedicated digital-reading devices. Right?
Actually, wrong. Even as its sales sag, the e-book reader remains as compelling a device for digital bookworms as when its sales were soaring.
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O'Reilly has published a number of Open Books--books with various forms of open copyright--over the years.
There's more to making Open Books available online than simply adopting an open license or giving up rights granted under copyright law. The print books need to be converted to a digital format so that they're accessible via the web.
We're happy to have partnered with two innovative nonprofits, Creative Commons and the Internet Archive, to solve the licensing and digitizing challenges involved in bringing Open Books to readers. Delete the scoop?
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The share of the book market attributable to self-published books is not an easy number to track down. But a lot of folks with skin in the game feel data like this is pretty important now that the indie publishing movement has a few years under its belt. However, if you pay attention to all the bloggers on this subject, its kind of comical how they stretch the math given the paucity of meaningful and transparent numbers.
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– Over the past several months and especially over the past two weeks, very few ebooks priced $8.00 to $9.99 have hit the DBW Ebook Best-Seller List. The literal translation of this observation is that readers aren’t buying many books at that price point. It could suggest that there are few popular titles being priced in that range. Delete the scoop?
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