Does Amazon permit URL linking inside its e-books?
After my post regarding Amazon's crackdown on 'interactive' e-books, I started asking for a clarification of just what this means.
Is any form of URL linking permitted inside an e-book?
How, exactly, is Amazon defining...
‘Smell of books’ perfume flourishes in the e-book age
Apparently it took the advent of e-books to make people fully aware of just how much they loved paper books. The latest evidence of this is the proliferation of perfumes and...
Scholarly Open Access Publishers: Beware the bad apples
Many, myself included, have embraced scholarly open access publishing as an antidote to the ills and exploitative practices of mainstream academic, scientific, and scholarly publishing. However, not all scholarly open access...
Kobo parent Rakuten cuts back European retail operations
Rakuten, parent company of Kobo and Overdrive, is shuttering its European retail site Rakuten.co.uk as of the end of August, according to reports in TechCrunch and Engadget. Formerly known as Play.com,...
Everything old is new again: ‘New Grub Street’ and the self-publishing dichotomy
On BookRiot, Hannah Engler delves 125 years into the past to find an uncannily prescient publishing satire. The book in question is New Grub Street, by George Gissing, which follows a...
Gareth Cuddy: Apple and Google don’t sell more e-books because they’re not interested
Why aren’t Apple and Google selling more e-books? Gareth Cuddy, founder and CEO of digital publishing startup Vearsa, ponders this question on Vearsa’s blog. (We’ve covered Cuddy’s innovation efforts in the...
Unlike the Big Five publishers, Disney happily bundles digital media with physical goods
Today I noticed a way in which the Big 5 print publishers are falling behind some companies in the movie industry. Strange as it is to say about a company that’s...
No, Wired, a serial novel is not something you can easily ‘binge’
What is it about the idea of serialized books and “binge” reading that makes so many people unclear on the concept? I already covered this with regard to Harlequin, which announced...
Authors! Protect your world rights, advises OWN IT! creator
The UK Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), responsible for authors' rights and licenses in Britain, shared an interview with Crystal Mahey-Morgan, creator of the digital publishing platform OWN IT! And...
Color Jane Friedman skeptical about print publishing resurgence
Jane Friedman, a self-publishing guru and formerly one of the powers behind Writers Digest, shares some thoughts on the current trend toward print supposedly coming back. Backing up her analysis with charts, Friedman effectively...