Peter Brantley
10 Things Ebook Merchants Should Offer
Jane at Dear Author has a wonderful list of 10 things ebook merchants should be providing as a matter of course. Here's just one example, but read the whole list: Buy a for a friend. The only site that offers this feature is Fictionwise. Amazon does not even offer this for Kindle which makes no sense. When a reader…
CEOs Must Have API Literacy
With the release of the expanded Google Book Search application programming interface (API) presenting new opportunities and decisions for publishers, Adam Hodgin argues for API-literate CEOs: Why does it matter whether your CEO knows what an API is? It matters because publishers (and newspaper owners, TV networks, film studios, content makers of all shapes) are not going to allow…
Stanza E-Reader Catching On with iPhone Users
VentureBeat writes about the success of Lexcycle's Stanza e-reader for the iPhone, and speculates that this type of platform will be far more successful than dedicated reader devices: Stanza is currently the number one ebook app for the iPhone, and chief operating officer Neelan Choksi shared some other impressive stats with me. In its first six weeks, Stanza was…
Library Uses Tags to Link Online-Offline Recommendations
LibraryTechNZ mentions an interesting engagement of a European library with its community, something that bookstores could also do: The library at the Hague in the Netherlands has introduced a simple form of tagging in real life. They now have two returns drop-boxes. One is for all items, and the other is for amazing books. Staff take the 'amazing' books…
iPhone Not Hot in Japan
The Wall Street Journal says iPhone sales are stagnating in Japan: According to market-research firm MM Research Institute, Apple sold about 200,000 phones in Japan in the first two months [July and August]. Since then, however, demand has been falling steadily, and analysts now widely believe sales are unlikely to reach a total of 500,000 units. That is half the…
UK Reaction to Sony Reader Release
Sara Lloyd discusses the impact of the Sony Reader's recent release in the United Kingdom: Anecdotally, Waterstones store staff report a great deal of interest from customers, and the rumour mills (or well-planned leak??) put a 6 figure number on the Sony Readers sold by the morning of Thursday 4th September. As I'm sure all of those working in…
Colleges Weigh Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use Rights
The Copyright Clearance Center is extending its offer of blanket licenses to larger universities. In a 2007 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), some school administrators expressed concern about the implicit waiver of fair use assertions: But some librarians are ambivalent about blanket licenses, Mr. Rehbach [Jeffrey R. Rehbach, the library-policy adviser at Middlebury College] says,…
Moving Ebooks into Mobility Culture
Sherman Young writes about how ebooks should be seen in the context of mobile platforms and as part of mobility culture. From M/C Journal: Instead of seeking to make an e-book culture a replacement for print culture, effectively placing the reading of books in a silo separated from other day-to-day activities, it might be better to situate e-books within a…
Writing Novels with Twitter
ReadWriteWeb has a brief survey of mini serialized novels in the U.S.: In Japan, mobile phone novels called "keitai shousetsu" have become so successful that they accounted for half of the ten best-selling novels in 2007. Here in the Western world several would-be novelists are attempting to use Twitter to create the same phenomenon. Some of the novels tweeted so…
Shopping Electronic Publishing Rights
Kassia Krozser discusses why and how authors are getting savvy to retaining electronic publishing rights. From Booksquare: As publishers like Random House try to redefine concepts such as "out-of-print", savvy authors and agents will be more diligent about defining tight deadlines for contracts (in fact, I'm a bit surprised this isn't happening more frequently). Firm deadlines allow authors to…