Have you noticed that the cost of some new e-books seems to be a few dollars higher than it was before? The U.S. Justice Department certainly has and they're investigating why that is and if it's legal. Specifically, the DOJ is looking into whether Apple and major publishers colluded to set e-book prices in a manner that would violate antitrust laws, the agency confirmed yesterday.
Media reports have pointed to the existence of such an investigation since last year, but yesterday an Justice Department official publicly acknowledged it, saying, "We are also investigating the electronic book industry, along with the European Commission and the states attorneys general." That's right, Europe and a handful of U.S. states are concerned about e-book pricing as well.
Kindle Cloud Reader, Amazon's HTML5-fueled Web app for reading e-books, is now available on Firefox, the company announced this morning. That brings the total number of compatible browsers for the product to four, if you count Safari separately for iPad and the desktop.
The app was first rolled out for Safari and Chrome in August. It not only makes one's Kindle e-book library more accessible, but allows Amazon to circumvent Apple's controversial in-app purchase fees.
Joining their counterparts in the film industry, large book publishing houses are the latest to take aim at users of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. John Wiley and Sons, the publisher of the popular "For Dummies" how-to book series, is suing 27 Bit Torrent users for downloading PDF files of the books, thereby infringing on Wiley's copyrights.
How extensive is the alleged book piracy? Demonoid.me users are said to have swapped copies of Photoshop CS5 All-In-One For Dummies more than 74,000 times, according to the lawsuit.
Findings.com is a new service that gives users a way to highlight and save quotes from digital texts and e-books, and send that information into a central, socially oriented news feed. The idea came about four years ago, when writer Steven Johnson wondered what it would be like to capture what someone was reading. Finding and capturing quotes is only one part of this service, though - its magic lies in the discovery aspects of the metadata.
"It's all about discovery, discovery of ideas, clips, people and other related materials. Over time we hope to conceptually connect peoples' findings to enable discovery," says BetaWorks Founder and Findings.com Co-Founder, John Borthwick. "We aren't collecting what people are reading right now on their devices (e.g. Kindle). We are collecting what they annotate."
With its latest update to the Kindle e-book format, Amazon is pushing electronic books closer to the look and feel of Web pages. Kindle Format 8 is the file format that will be used by the Kindle Fire for displaying e-books when the tablet device ships next month.
The new format moves away from the previous Mobi standard in favor of one that supports many of the rich layout and formatting features of HTML5 and CSS3.
Google's e-bookstore is now available in the United Kingdom. In addition to its primary offerings, Google has partnered with independent booksellers like Gardners' Hive and Blackwell's, so U.K customers can buy books through those stores.
Google's e-book format is widely compatible, available on Android and Apple devices, Sony, Kobo and Elonex e-readers, as well as through the Web. They're stored in the cloud, so you can pick up where you left off on any device. You won't find native support for your Kindle or your Nook, though.
In addition to the hotly anticipated Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon has announced a range of new e-ink Kindles. The first is a a full-screen, touch-controlled e-reader in the vein of its leading competitor, Barnes & Noble's latest Nook. It's called the Kindle Touch. The Wi-Fi only model is $99, and the 3G version is $149. A lighter full-screen Kindle without touch controls will sell for $79. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that it's "75% lighter than previous generations." These Kindles ship on November 21.
As e-books continue to grow in popularity, there's a seemingly unwinnable debate over which is better: digital books or their paper-based counterparts. Both have their advantages and it'll likely be quite awhile before paper books come close to disappearing. In addition all of the benefits that e-books bring, is it possible that they may also make it more difficult for books to be banned in the future?
Out of the American Library Association's top 10 most-banned books of last year, all but three of them are available for purchase from Amazon's Kindle Store, notes a blog post from Beyond Black Friday.
Amazon threw down the gauntlet against terrestrial competitors today by announcing that Kindle and Kindle app customers can borrow and purchase Kindle books from more than 11,000 local libraries in the United States.
In essence, these first 11,000 local libraries just became a chain of local bookstores for Amazon's catalog of virtual books.
As the company prepares to launch its long-rumored Android-powered tablet, Amazon is busy hammering out content initiatives to ensure the device is well-suited to delivering ample digital content consumers and, in turn, more revenue back to the company's bottom line.
In addition to negotiating with magazines and newspapers to offer a subscription service it hopes can challenge Apple's upcoming Newsstand, Amazon is reportedly also thinking about launching an e-book rental service, according to the Wall Street Journal. The service would make a library of backlist e-books available to Amazon Prime subscribers, who already pay $79 per year for free fast shipping and some on-demand video.
