All Articles Tagged "electronic books"
Ballin’ On A Budget: E-Reading Edition
E-readers are all the rage now from the iPad to the Kindle and everything in between. In fact, Harris Interactive did a recent survey that found that 1 in 6 Americans now owns an e-reader. It’s not surprising since you can now download the newest novel delivered to you without leaving your couch. The downside is that if you are a voracious reader, like I am, purchasing all those e-books can get quite expensive. When I purchased my first e-reader, I racked up over $200 in e-books in less than 6 months. However, once I did my research, I realized that ebooks are often cheaper than physical books. Here are some tips to get your read on without breaking your pockets.
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E-Books Outsell the Traditional at Amazon
(Fast Company) — Since April the first, for every 100 print-and-paper books Amazon has sold, it’s also sold 105 e-books, according to a fresh Amazon announcement. Kindle e-readers arrived, along with a small but fast-growing digital bookstore, in November 2007–by July 2010, Amazon notes, Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover book sales, and then six months later beat the paperback books sales rate. Now Amazon’s customers are “choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly,” says CEO Jeff Bezos, comparing Amazon’s 15-year heritage of selling physical books to just four years of e-book sales.
Magazine Publishers Ready Tablet App Store
(Wall Street Journal) — The country’s largest magazine publishers are gearing up to launch their own service for distributing digital publications on tablets, competing head-on with technology companies they’ve relied on to distribute their apps to date. More than a year after it was first announced, Next Issue Media, a joint-venture of five media companies, will launch in the next few months, Morgan Guenther, NIM’s chief executive, said in an interview this week. Mr. Guenther, the former president of TiVo Inc., said that NIM will likely go live with two titles from its four magazine owners: Time Inc., Condé Nast, Hearst Corp. and Meredith Corp. Mr. Guenther said it will have added a “full-lineup” of titles, including newspapers, from its owners by the summer. The offerings could include versions of newspapers sold by News Corp, the fifth member of the consortium.
Google Digital Newsstand Aims to Muscle In on Apple
(Wall Street Journal) — Google Inc. and Apple Inc. have stepped up their battle to win over publishers, as the two companies vie to become the dominant distributor of newspapers and magazines for tablet computers and other mobile devices. Google is trying to drum up publishers’ support for a new Google-operated digital newsstand for users of devices that run its Android software. With the effort, it is chasing Apple, which already sells digital versions of many major magazines and newspapers through its iTunes store.
Booksellers Find Their Place in Changing Industry
(The Network Journal) — Watermark Books & Cafe on a midweek morning was bustling with book browsers and coffee sippers. It’s been a surprisingly good year for the Wichita bookstore, as it has been for many independent bookstores across the nation. Watermark owner Sarah Bagby estimates her book sales have risen 20 percent in the past 12 months compared with the prior year. Yet bookstore owners are girding for the changes shaking the industry, with the big chains possibly consolidating, the continued growth of online booksellers, and the rapid rise of e-books.
Delivering ‘Decoded’ in Multiple Ways
(Wall Street Journal) — Buying a new book isn’t as easy as it used to be. Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Bertelsmann AG’s Random House Inc., last month put Jay-Z’s memoir and lyric guide, “Decoded,” on sale as a $35 hardcover. It also made a digital edition available at the same price, although Amazon.com Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc. sell it for only $9.99. The book has been a big hit. Published on Nov. 16, it has 330,000 copies in print, according to its publisher, a significant number of copies in this economy.
African-American Publishing in the Digital Era
(Publishers Weekly) — Many publishers are still trying to understand what impact the rapid growth of digital technology will have on the industry and their businesses. Publishers of titles aimed at the African-American market are no different, and the digital strategies—from making e-books readable on every kind of device to using online marketing and social media—are very much the same. PW talked with a variety of publishers—from small independents to the large New York trade book houses—about how they are using digital publishing and the new technologies to reach readers in the African-American book market. The promise of digital publishing prompted Karen Hunter—publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint Karen Hunter Publishing, a line of mostly nonfiction works aimed at the African-American market—to align with a new and separate digital publishing venture. She’s heading a digital publishing house that will launch in January and is owned by Mgmt one, a business advisory firm headquartered in Cincinnati. First One Digital Publishing plans to publish 10 e-books and will determine whether to publish print editions on a case-by-case basis.
Big Numbers for Bestsellers Show E-Books Are Here to Stay
(Daily Finance) — Former President George W. Bush’s new book Decision Points was widely expected to be one of the biggest books of the fall, and based on its opening-day sales numbers — more than 220,000 copies sold — that’s proving to be the case. But what’s particularly eye-popping about those figures is not that Bush’s book was Random House’s best-selling non-fiction title in 16 years (when another former President, Bill Clinton, moved 400,000 copies of his autobiography My Life on its first day of sale) but that 50,000 of those sales came from e-books. ”It shows the digital market’s rapid growth,” spokesman David Drake of the Crown Publishing Group, the Random House division that published Decision Points, told the Associated Press. Considering that e-sales accounted for more than 20% of the total, “rapid growth” is an understatement.
