Category: eBooks
-
Nicholas Negroponte Predicts E-Books Will “Kill” Physical Books within Five Years
Nicholas Negroponte, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and also the founder of the One Laptop per Child Association made a rather bold prediction at the Techonomy conference in in Lake Tahoe, CA last week. His prediction? Printed books are “dead” within five years. Here’s a summary of his comments…
-
Barnes & Noble: How the Mighty have Fallen
Multiple news sources are reporting that Barnes & Noble, the bookseller with 720 stores and the recent Nook e-reader, is thinking about putting itself up for sale. (Full disclosure: B&N is my favorite book or any other kind of store. I’m a fan.) Being a publicly traded company, B&N is constantly under pressure to try…
-
Author Patricia Ryan Talks About Self-Publishing with E-Books
Contemporary and historical romance novelist Patricia Ryan recently had an online “chat” with TeleRead where she offered her insights and predictions about established authors turning to self-publishing via e-books. Since 1995, Ryan has authored 27 novels and novellas for the likes of Bantam, Berkley Prime Crime, Signet, NAL, Harlequin and and St. Martin’s. It’s a…
-
Amazon Speaks Out on Agency Model, E-Book Prices and Market Share
CNET recently interviewed Ian Freed, Amazon vice president in charge of the Kindle. Among the interesting things he said was that Amazon sells 70-80 percent of all e-books sold. When asked about claims by Apple and Barnes & Noble that they have something like 20 percent of the market each, Freed said Amazon’s pretty sure…
-
E-Books Now Outselling Hardcover Books at Amazon.com
It seems a trend at some coffee and sandwich shops in New York City is to ban computer use, at least for a few hours each day. In a New York Times article on August 2, author Nick Bilton relates his experience with “please put down the Kindle sir.” The interesting bit of news from…
-
Jason Epstein Writes on the Future of E-Books
The following quote from Jason Epstein is from an article he published in the The New York Review of Books, March 11, 2010: “The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly…
-
Why I Chose to Buy an Amazon Kindle as My eBook Reader
Before departing on a recent business trip to London, I purchased an Amazon Kindle 2 (Global version) ebook reader for the trip. The trip was my shameless justification for buying. You see, I’m a hopelessly, forever-comitted reading addict. I’ve been a regular reader since my youth, and my reading habit seems to have progressed from…