Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, unveiled two cool new products and lowered the price of their flagship Kindle to $79 (damn, I bought mine at the beginning of June for $139).

Amazon also unveiled the Kindle Touch (both in 3G and WiFi-only) and the Kindle Fire, the long awaited Amazon tablet. I’m guessing they are changing the eReader and tablet game, not in terms of technology, but price.

Continue Reading

Sigh. I’ve thought I’ve seen it all in the petty arguments against ebooks. I’ll admit that the author of this one at least tries to make an academic case that ebooks are ruining the world. But it still falls short in many ways. Even worse, the author reverts back to the petty arguments against ebooks that I see all the time.

The article, Will E-Books Destroy the Democratizing Effects of Reading? from the website Technology Review basically says ebooks are bad because you can’t share them like print books, ebooks are going to destroy libraries, blah, blah, blah.

Continue Reading

Starbucks is now offering a “Free Ebook of the Week” through Apple. Though as some angry customers discovered, Starbucks is using the word “free” a little too liberally.

The offering is pretty much in line with the free song they offer each week, also through Apple. There’s just one difference: The song is actually free.

Continue Reading

Looks like we are finally seeing the fallout from the liquidation of Borders Booksellers. Publishers Weekly is reporting that July bookstore sales were down 4%:

The impact of the closing of Borders’s stores is starting to show up in industry numbers. According to preliminary estimates released Wednesday morning by the Census Bureau, bookstore sales fell 4.2% in July, the steepest decline in 2011. Sales dropped to $982 million from $1.02 billion in July 2010. The July decline followed a 1.9% drop in June and as a result bookstore sales for the first seven months of 2011 were down 0.5%, to $8.03 billion.

Sales for the entire retail segment rose 6.2% in July and 7.9% for the first seven months of 2011.

It will be interesting to see how bookstore sales do after the fallout from Borders comes to an end. I’m predicting print book sales will continue to decline while ebook sales will increase.

Amazon might be poised to throw yet another game changer into the world of ebooks. There are rumors that the largest online retailer wants to offer a Netflix-style subscription service for ebooks.

For a monthly and/or annual fee users can access Amazon’s library of ebooks and read a limited number of books. This subscription-based ebook store idea has been floated around for a while, but no one has yet to implement it in a way that has really connected with consumers.

Continue Reading

The end of print books is near. Very near. At least, that’s what the Swedish maker of cheap, near-impossible-to-assemble furniture company Ikea is predicting.

That’s why the furniture maker is re-designing some of their bookshelves to feature glass doors, on the assumption that print books will soon be relics to be displayed in museum cases.

Continue Reading

Sony appears to be taking on Amazon directly with a shiny new eReader. The Sony Reader WiFi is the latest ebook reader offered by the electronics company, and it’s packed with features.

The Reader has a nifty touch screen. You can pinch and spread your fingers for easy zooming. And turning the pages is as easy as swiping your finger across the screen, which according to this article, is pretty smooth.

Continue Reading

Gone are the days when you have to keep your kids occupied by letting them play with (and potentially breaking) your shiny new iPad. Now, you can get your little rug rats their own tablet computer that’s designed just for kids.

LeapFrog has created a nifty tablet called the LeapPad. The device is geared toward 3-5 year olds. It comes pre-loaded with a few games and educational stuff, and parents can even download additional apps from the LeapFrog website. The LeapPad retails for about $100, but for a little more, you can get a “bundle” with additional apps included.

Continue Reading

A new start-up service called Instebooks is turning everyone with a cell phone into an author. If you have a mobile device, you can be an ebook author with relative ease.

Writing ebooks via cell phone is nothing new. Back in 2009 I wrote a post about how popular these kind of novels are in Japan. It appears that finally, this type of self-publishing might catch on here in the west.

Continue Reading