Earlier today Tom Weldon of Penguin Random House UK revealed that PRH would not be getting into the subscription ebook market. Speaking at The Bookseller’s Futurebook conference, the CEO for a branch of the world’s largest trade publisher said that:

Weldon said: “We have two problems with subscription. We are not convinced it is what readers want. ‘Eat everything you can’ isn’t a reader’s mindset. In music or film you might want 10,000 songs or films, but I don’t think you want 10,000 books.” Continue reading →

Yesterday’s news about Amazon burying the Hachette has sparked a lot of discussion about the future of the book industry, including a blue sky piece over at Bloomberg.

Mark Gimen thinks that social networks like Facebook are where you’re going to find the future bookstores. Working from the current state of the news industry, which is depending more and more on Facebook for traffic, he suggests that Facebook could be the next platform for selling books: Continue reading →

When Amazon launched the new Kindle and Kindle Voyage earlier this year, they promised to release a software update which added a slew of new features.

It’s here. Continue reading →

Must-read stories this morning include a fun take on the differences between American and Caunaudiaun spelling, growing support for e-tax laws, and a critical take on conferences.

• 6 Key Terms in Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing Contract (MarcyKennedy)
• Amazon, Indies, Barnes & Noble Unite for E-tax Fairness (PW)
• Anyone else have a problem with Canadian/UK spelling? (YOURS IN STORYTELLING…)
• The Economist Espresso: Our new daily edition for smartphones (The Economist)
• On conferences (Studio Tendra)
• Pitching Literary Festivals, Genre Boundaries And Crime Fiction. With Clare Mackintosh (The Creative Penn)

PW reported earlier today that Wattpad has the same piracy problem as the ebookstores, Scribd, and pretty much every other site that allows users to upload content: Continue reading →

Fresh from the successful fight against Amazon, Douglas Preston took to the review section of the Kindle Store today to complain about the delayed release of Blue Labyrinth.

The ebook is available now, but as Preston explained in his review, Amazon is responsible delaying the release of the Kindle edition: Continue reading →

Remember the news from March that B&N and MS had decided to retire the Nook app for Windows 8 and replace it with a Microsoft-built app?

According to my source, plans have changed. That source has told me that starting early next year the Nook app for Windows 8 will be bundled in Windows in select markets. Continue reading →

Vook continued to gobble up its smaller competitors today with the acquisition of Coliloquy*.

Founded in 2011, Coliloquy first got its start in developing interactive ebook apps for the Kindle (as in the Kindle ereaders, and not the Fire Android tablets).  As Amazon wound down the development program for Kindle Active Content, Coliloquy expanded their focus to include developing apps for other platforms, including Android and iOS. Continue reading →

Hachette and Amazon’s bitter months-long dispute over ebook and print contract  terms came to an abrupt end today with the news that the two had buried the hatchet.

The specifics of the deal were not disclosed, so we do not know in whose back the hatchet was buried, but in a statement Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch said that “this is great news for writers”. Continue reading →

One of the niftier features of the Kindle Store is the way that it lets you embed a sample of an ebook in a webpage. Now there’s an option for indie authors to do the same with just about any Epub file, albeit in a slightly more complicated and less convenient way.

A Japanese developer by the name of Satoru Matsushima has released a self-contained Epub viewer which can be installed on most websites. It’s called BiB/i, and all that is required is for you to upload the code for the viewer as well as the ebook you want to embed, and them post the embed code.

The embed code looks like what you would see with the manual (non-automatic) Youtube embedded videos, so some technical skill is required.

I haven’t installed it myself on this blog, but as you can see below it does work:

Mein eBook

You can find other demos here.
The code works well, and you can even use BiB/i to open an ebook sitting on your computer. Simply open the ebook embedded above, switch to full screen, and then drag another EPub file into your web browser.

This won’t work so well for large ebooks (for those it is recommended that you unzip the ebook file before uploading it) but I did just test it myself. I was able to open a couple different Epub files. They were slow to load at first but I could read them.

I’ve just heard of BiB/i, so I can’t tell you if it is in widespread use yet, but I do know of at least one alternative (besides uploading a sample to Scribd and embedding that). There’s Epub2Twitter, which lets you embed ebooks in a Tweet, and ReadK.it, which enables authors and publishers to create self-contained ebooks which can open themselves in a web browser (as well as regular ebook apps).