I wanted to take a moment to wish everyone (who celebrates it) a very Merry Christmas! Hopefully all of you will be finding shiny new eReaders waiting under the Christmas tree this morning. That said, Amazon’s and Barnes & Noble’s websites might be running a little slow from everyone downloading their first ebooks.

Regardless of what is waiting for you under the tree, please enjoy this holiday. For me it’s a much needed break and I’ll be able to spend some quality time with my family. That said, you probably won’t hear from me until the New Year.

Thanks for all your support in 2011. My blog wouldn’t be where it is without all of you.

Merry Christmas!

Brad

Publishers Weekly is reporting ebook sales figures for the month of October, and as usual, it looks really good.

I’ll let the PW article speak for itself:

E-book sales rose 81.2% in October, to $72.8 million, at the 20 publishers who supply e-book figures to the Association of American Publishers monthly sales report. The 81% increase was the first time this year that e-book sales did not double over the same month in 2010. For the first 10 months of the year, e-book sales were up 131.1%, to $807.7 million.

With eReader prices falling and more consumers jumping onto the ebook bandwagon, it seems we’ll see this trend continue into the foreseeable future.

I’m guessing that there will be many shiny eReaders wrapped up and placed under the Christmas tree this year. Given that the price of eReaders has dropped to below $100, they are becoming more affordable to more people.

When you go to buy ebooks though, the books might not be as cheap as they used to be. Over the last year or so the price of ebooks has been slowly creeping upwards.

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This month marks the 5-year anniversary of Brad’s Reader! In late December 2006 I began this blog using Google’s Blogger platform to write mostly about literature and philosophy.

Since then, Brad’s Reader has morphed from literature, to reading and writing, to technology. None of the changes were planned, they just sort of happened. As a result, the number of unique visitors has risen dramatically every year since.

In celebration of this 5-year anniversary, and the holidays, I’m giving away a $25 Amazon Gift Card!

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Sometimes it’s easy to forget that there are other tablet computers out there other than the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet. The Kindle and Nook aside, the iPad remains the large fish in an expanding pond.

One of the newer tablets on the market is the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. Asus is known for making cheap netbooks for those who need a laptop, without all the frills and gimmicks of a Macbook or PC.

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The ebook industry is coming under heavy scrutiny from US and European officials investigating antitrust allegations. The justice department, states attorney general and EU officials are seeing whether or not several publishers fixed prices when they inked a deal with Apple before the launch of the iBookstore.

Central to the investigation is the “agency model.” This allows publishers to set ebook prices while giving Apple or Amazon (for example) a percentage of the sale. The agency model prevents ebook retailers from setting prices too low, thus devaluing the ebook (or so publishers say).

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You’d think a science fiction author would be one of the first to embrace emerging technology, like ebooks, for example. But there are some holdouts. One of them has been famed Sci-Fi author Ray Bradbury.

I wrote about him back in 2009, mostly about how much he loathed the internet. Well finally, Bradbury fans can read his classic Fahrenheit 451 (aff link) as an ebook.

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