The largest book retailer in the United States is making the bold move of considering bundling ebooks and print books. Barnes & Noble, who came out with their own ereader Nook last November, will begin testing the idea within the next few months. This is according to a recent article on Publishers Weekly and the Teleread blog.

I’ve been advocating for this type of bundling for a while now. The obvious advantage is that you can read the print version in the comfort of your own home, and then take the ebook version with you while you’re on the go. This would work especially well with dinosaur-sized books like Stephen King’s Under the Dome (which I’m currently reading as an ebook). If I had bought King’s latest magnum opus as a hardcover, you certainly wouldn’t see me lugging it around so I could read a few pages in the doctor’s office waiting room.

Continue Reading

Over the last year I’ve talked to a lot of people with e-readers. A majority of them have the Amazon Kindle, a few Sony Readers and a handful of the new Barnes & Noble Nook. Everyone says the same thing: They love their ebook reader. Those with the Kindle or Nook, which can download ebooks wirelessly tell me that they read a lot more with the e-reader than before.

Surprisingly (at least to me), the one subject that never comes up is DRM. I’ve “educated” a lot of newbies to the world of ebooks about the dangers of DRM, and most simply aren’t that worried about it. Their main concern is ease-of-use. Downloading an ebook via  a wireless network with the touch of a button is quick and easy – instant satisfaction with no tech skills required.

Continue Reading

Oh Apple, how you disappoint me. It appears that the new iBooks app for the newly announced iPad will be bogged down with DRM, making it hard (if not impossible) to share ebooks you buy from Apple. I’ve had a hard time getting specifics, but I found a few reputable blogs posting the same thing.

Continue Reading

Did you honestly think I’d go without writing a post about the newest cool gadget from Apple? Don’t worry, I’m not turning Brad’s Reader into a fanboy site, but the iPad has tremendous implications for the world of ebooks. Will it be the long awaited ‘Kindle killer’? I don’t know.

For the last year or so (maybe even longer) there have been rumors that Apple would eventually release a tablet device. That day has come. At first glace, iPad is a beefed up version of the iPhone/iPod Touch. But under the hood the iPad is impressive. I want onto the MacRumors blog and here’s what they had to say:

Continue Reading

Book publishers are still struggling to figure out a way to deal with ebook pirates in a way that will not alienate the average ebook reader. The music industry did a very crappy job of this, and they are paying the price.

In general, the publishers believe that ebooks strip sales from print books (of course, print books are more expensive) and that ebooks are so easy to pirate, they need to be loaded with draconian DRM to protect the financial interests of the publishing company and the author.

I think that these publishers are deluding themselves. Ebooks can help drive sales of print books and ebooks, in the end, are more profitable because of the ‘infinite supply’ theory. Furthermore, DRM has done little to stop pirates. DRM only serves to keep honest readers from buying an ebook.

Continue Reading

One of my biggest frustrations with reading ebooks is how they are formatted. I’m not talking about the file type (i.e. Epub, PDF, PDB, lrf, mobi, etc), I’m talking about how the ebook looks on the device’s screen. Like most other things with ebooks, there is no standard, at least not yet.

Right now I’m reading Stephen King’s new novel Under the Dome (aff link) as an ebook – one I purchased from Sony’s ebook store for my Sony Pocket Edition. When I first opened the ebook on my reader, I had to flip through about 10 pages of the usual copyright stuff, acknowledgments, a page with just the title on it (lest I forget what I’m reading between opening the ebook and clicking through those first few pages).

Continue Reading

Sometimes I just want to throw my hands up in the air and give up. I’m talking about those publishers and authors who are paranoid about their books being pirated if they’re released as ebooks. This ’strategy’ is not very business smart. Why? Because when a publisher/author refuses to release a book in ebook format for fear of pirating, it gets pirated anyway. I’ve pointed this out in one of my most commented-on posts J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the definition of irony.

Now we can add Stephen King into the mix (yes, that Stephen King, the one who wrote an exclusive ebook for the new Kindle he helped promote). His newest novel ‘Under the Dome’ was released in ebook format several weeks after the print release of the book. Publishers didn’t want the lower ebook price to eat away at the higher hard cover price. Within days of the print release, pirated ebooks of ‘Under the Dome’ were circulating around the internet. In turn, this ate away at print and ebook sales.

Continue Reading

The past 10 years have seen a lot of changes in the publishing world. The biggest change of them all is ebooks. 10 years ago ebooks were a still a novelty enjoyed by mostly techies/geeks and were a popular product for online multi-level marketing schemes where ebook topics dealt mostly with get-quick-rich marketing methods and the like. The ebooks were of poor quality and filled with grammar/spelling errors. This probably did more to damage the reputation of ebooks than anything else.

Fast forward to 2009 and ebooks are becoming much more mainstream (still a small segment of the publishing industry, but growing) and publishers are now scrambling to figure out how to deal with this new form of consuming our favorite literary works. Add to that the family of ebook readers from Sony, Amazon and now Barnes & Noble, I think it’s safe to say that ebooks aren’t going anywhere.

Continue Reading

Today I was watching the news and they were giving money-saving tips for the holiday shopping season. One of the tips was saying ‘No!” to extended warranty plans that many stores try to talk consumers into when buying electronics. This got me thinking about ebook reading devices and whether or not it’s worth the extra money for an extended warranty.

Personally, I’ve had a good experience in the past with an extended warranty. When I bought my first laptop in 1999 (a Compaq Presario) I purchased the extended warranty, not really knowing any better. Little did I know this would pay off big time. A few years later the screen on my laptop suddenly stopped working.

I took it into the store where I purchased it and they replaced the screen for free. My laptop also had other problems that required lengthy and expensive repairs – at no cost to me thanks to the extended warranty I purchased.

I calculated the cost of the repairs to be about as much as the laptop was worth when I bought it.  I really lucked out. Since then I’ve had a pretty good feeling about these warranties because, let’s face it, electronics can be fragile and tend to break down at the worst possible times.

Continue Reading

If you find yourself needing to write on the go, but lack a solution that doesn’t involve napkins and back of receipts, then you’re in luck. Now there’s a high-tech solution that allows you to write all you want on your iPhone or iPod Touch (aff link) with an app called My Writing Nook.

Continue Reading