ebooks

Google’s Play Books now lets you upload any e-book you, ahem, happen to have on any of your Android devices to your central repository. Neat.

Charles Stross gives us a sneak peek at his new novel

Today, author Charlie Stross, from this month’s book club selection, joined us for a Q&A, where he filled us his thoughts on how new writers get traction, the skyrocketing of ebook sales (from 1% to 50% of his sales in the last five years), and gave us the first line of his new book coming…

You Can Now Get Calvin and Hobbes as E-Books

Words cannot express how giddily excited we are by this news: you can finally get Calvin and Hobbes ebooks for the first time. Goodbye, weekend. Almost 30 years since their inception, the comic strips are now available in digital form. There are three altogether: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, and…

Amazon’s Throwing Independent Booksellers a Kindle Lifeline

Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other e-readers are usually considered nails in the traditional independent bookstore’s coffin. Amazon’s flipping all that around, with a program that lets bookstores sell Kindle e-readers and make money off the e-books their owners buy. https://gizmodo.com/kindle-fire-hdx-review-third-times-a-charmer-1427201835 Announced today, Amazon Source gives independent bookstores a discount when buying Kindles and related accessories…

Neil Gaiman is writing a Doctor Who ebook—and you can read an excerpt

Neil Gaiman is writing one more adventure for the Eleventh Doctor, this time in ebook form. His ebook story Doctor Who: Nothing O’Clock will follow the Doctor and Amy Pond to the year 1984, when they’ll face a newly created monster. The Guardian has a two-page excerpt of the story, which comes out on November…

America’s First Bookless Public Library Has Arrived Right On Schedule

America’s first completely bookless public library opened in San Antonio this past weekend. That is, if you define a “book” as words printed on paper pages which are bound together with glue. But if you define “book” a bit more liberally, the new library has plenty them. Over 10,000 ebook titles, in fact. All of…

Nerd Out on This Sprawling Oral History of Apple Design

If you, like me, pored over the Steve Jobs biography (or perhaps over Jobs) looking for juicy tidbits about Apple’s design culture, you likely were sorely disappointed. We know plenty about Jobs’ mercurial management and even about his own aesthetic sensibilities, but for a company that’s so devoted to design—heck, it even stamps “Designed by…

How can you make the ebook novella boom work for you?

When Jeff Noon made his long-awaited return to science fiction, it was with a novella called Channel Sk1n, rather than a full-length novel. And Noon says that the rise of ebook publishers made it possible for him to publish a book that might have seemed too slight in print form. Over at Forbes, Suw Charman-Anderson…

Travelers Beware: Google Play Might Delete All Your Books (Updated)

It’s easy to forget that owning something digitally is way different from owning it for real. And if you do forget, it can bite you in the ass. That’s what happened to Jim O’Donnell when he traveled into Singapore and found that Google Play Books app on his iPad had up and deleted all his…

An Unexpected Price War Is Making Amazon Book Prices Lower Than Ever

Amazon appears to have slashed the prices of its books, thanks to an Overstock.com promo in which it priced all of its books at least 10 percent below Amazon. The aggressive pricing strategy has been enough to see Bezos & Co. cut the prices of hardcover book by between 50 percent and 65 percent compared…

Pay what you want for these two scifi ebook bundles

There are currently not one, but two ebook bundles that let you pay what you want for a bunch of science fiction ebooks. Head over to the Humble eBook Bundle and StoryBundle to grab several books for potentially little money. Humble Bundle is running its second ebook bundle with Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Cherie Priest’s…

Microsoft’s 1999 Predictions for Ebooks of the 21st Century

Alexis Madrigal over at The Atlantic has a fun dissection of Microsoft’s 1999 magazine ad campaign which featured predictions for ebooks in the 21st century. John Overholt, a curator of early modern books and manuscripts at Harvard University, posted the ads to Flickr and tweeted them out yesterday. Some were way off the mark, like…

You can now upload your own ebooks—up to 1,000 EPUB or PDF files—for free to Google Play Books. Useful.

Why Do We Keep Making Ebooks Like Paper Books?

Comparing books to ebooks is like comparing mechanical watches to digital watches, or manual cars to automatic cars. No one doubts the convenience, reach, and flexibility of the ebook format, but it will never convincingly replicate the experience of a paper book—nor does it need to. Ebooks are a fundamentally new medium, stuck in an…

Report: Barnes & Noble Might Give Up on the Nook (Updated)

According to the New York Times, struggling bookmonger Barnes & Noble might be about to shelve its Nook. The problem is one more common to physical books than tablets: nobody’s buying them. The Nook’s not going to disappear entirely, even if Barnes & Noble disengages from the hardware side of things. The company’s instead considering…

Amazon Has a Patent to Sell Used Ebooks

The problem with most ebooks is you can’t exactly give them with a friends or pass them onto your children when you’re done. But Amazon might actually address that with a new patent to sell used ebooks. Unfortunately you can’t just buy an ebook and own an ebook and do what you want with it.…

Visit Apple’s iBookstore for a Curated Selection of Self-Published Soft Porn

Apple has added a new section of the iBookstore called Breakout Books that highlights up and coming self-published books from “emerging talents.” Titles are grouped into genres, like sci-fi, mysteries & thrillers, and romance, just like the books section of your local grocery store. Here’s a synopsis of one such title, Bridesmaid Lotto by Rachel…

Would You Buy Ebooks on a Pay-As-You-Read Basis?

A start-up called TotalBooX, baed in Tel Aviv, is planning to “disrupt” the ebook market by selling books on a pay-as-you-read basis. But would you be interested? The idea is simple: instead of paying for a book up front—which is easy to do rashly with 1-click purchasing—you instead pay a small fee for each page…

San Antonio’s Launching the First Completely Bookless Public Library

Books, who needs ’em? Libraries? Not anymore they don’t. The first public, bookless library is coming to San Antonio soon and, possibly, to a (dystopic?) future near you. The new book-free library, called “BiblioTech,” is intended to open in the fall and is part of a an entire bookless public library system planned for the…

McGraw-Hill’s SmartBooks: Digital Textbooks With Built-In Drill Sergeants

When textbooks were actually books they were good for flattening posters and bringing monitors to eye-level. Now their ebook personas may really force you to learn. Grim, I know. Textbook publishing behemoth McGraw-Hill is producing a series of adaptive e-textbooks in 90 subject areas. Targeted at college-level classes, the SmartBooks quiz students as they read…