ReadWriteWeb

Writing a book will never be easy, but FastPencil's mission is to make things easier for authors by bringing this process online and to collaborate with others. FastPencil takes writers from idea to published book. The service offers features for collaboration, editing and design, as well as professional consulting services for authors. One cool feature of FastPencil is that it can import blog posts and turn them into books and e-books that bloggers can then sell through all the major book distribution channels.

The Internet Archive has just unveiled their ambitious project called BookServer, which will allow users to find, buy, or borrow digital books from sources all across the web. The system, built on an open architecture and using open book formats, promises that the books housed there will work on any device whether that's a laptop, PC, smartphone, game console, or one of the myriad of e-Readers like Amazon's Kindle.

The project's lofty goal is to essentially create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search.

When you think about Google Books, chances are that you are thinking about eBooks and searching books on your desktop. Starting today, however, On Demand Books, the makers of the Espresso Book Machine, will have access to Google's vast library of public domain books. Bookstores that buy an Espresso Book Machine will now be able to provide on-demand printing services for any of the close to 2 million books in Google's repository.

Google Books may be mired in controversy, but that isn't stopping Google from regularly adding new features to the service. Today, Google Books received a major update, with seven new and useful features, including the ability to easily embed a book into a blog post, better search within books, easier access to tables of content, and a way to turn pages, as well as an improved Book Overview page.

Dan Hon is building a radical new future for one of humanity's oldest activities - the telling of stories. The modest young UK CEO's design company Six to Start won Best in Show at this week's SXSW Web Awards. The company's project, called Telling Stories, is a six part experiment with the book publisher Penguin.

Hon's vision of the future is sci-fi influenced, cross-platform and web-native. He mocks the "urban games" of online hipsters but believes there will soon be a layer of "Harry Potter ether" that we can dip in and out of while we're walking to work.

If you spend time on the mobile web, you know there's certainly no shortage of content already available on our phones. What if you're on the run and get a hankering for some classic literature though? Enter the just released Google Book Search Mobile at books.google.com/m.

It's a very handy new version of the site that lets you search through and read in full, 1.5 million books on your phone's browser. Regular Google Book Search users know that these books are all scanned in as images, but for the new mobile version Google has used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to grab the text on the pages. The whole system works quite well.

Project Gutenberg, the longtime home of free eBooks on the web, has just introduced a mobile-ready version of their hosted content. Called PG Mobile, or Project Gutenberg's Mobile Edition, the software transforms the plain text of the files on the Project Gutenberg web site into a format that can be read easily on mobile devices with small screens.

"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Dylan Thomas

Who will turn this crisis around? We will. Who else? And how else but with innovation and entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurs: this is your time to step up to the plate. Hard as the times may be, you must remember, many, many great companies were born during recessions. And many others almost died in the midst of recessions but managed to survive through their founders' tremendous grit and resilience.

Google today announced that it has reached a deal with book publishers to settle two copyright lawsuits over potential copyright violations in its Google Book Search product. This $125 million settlement, which still needs approval from a U.S. district court, will be used to establish a Book Rights Registry that will ensure that publishers and authors receive compensation from subscription services and ad revenue. For users of Google Book Search, this settlement will mean that they might soon be able to build an "online bookshelf" and buy licenses to read the full-text of books in Google's index.

Tough economic times and startups have at least one thing in common - you need character and determination to survive. Character is what it takes to win, to believe and to persuade others. It's a mix of passion, determination, sleepless hours, hard work. Character is about crossing the finish line, about achieving dreams and goals.

While there are inborn traits that help to develop character, often character comes from inspiration. Ask any enterprenuer about who set the bar for them and you will hear the name of another enterprenuer, a historical figure, a writer, even a fictional character. So in this post, we look at five very different books that share a common theme - remarkable people.

CAPTCHAs, those pesky challenge-response tests that many web sites use to determine whether you are human or a spambot, are an annoyance to many users. According to a report in Science (subscription required), users now solve about 100 million CAPTCHAs a day. ReCAPTCHA, a project based at Carnegie Mellon University, has found an ingenious way to harness all this work and, according to the findings published in Science this week, CAPTCHAs could be used to transcribe printed texts at the rate of 160 books a day.

Google today announced embeddable previews for all books included in Google's Book Search. Developers can now make use of a set of APIs to embed these previews into any site. Google has already signed up a large number of bookstores, libraries, and social book sites for this new service. Amazon, of course, has included book previews on its own site since 2003, but thanks to this new feature of Google Books, any vendor can now add book previews to their sites for free.

Shelfari, a small book sharing startup, was acquired today by Amazon (an existing investor in the company). Shelfari is known for its innovative user interface, something which we've discussed a few times on ReadWriteWeb. Shelfari's competitors include GoodReads and LibraryThing. The relationship with the latter has been frosty, with LibraryThing writing on its site today that Shelfari is a "clone" and that it is "somewhat less intellectual, less featureful", among other barbs.

Amazon today announced that it will acquire AbeBooks, the online marketplace for used and rare books. Given the breadth of Amazon's product line, it is sometimes easy to forget that, at its core, Amazon is still a book seller, even if its product line now ranges from hosted Web 2.0 services to bulk groceries. AbeBooks, which was formerly known as the Adcanved Book Exchange, launched in Canada and the US in 1996 and has since expanded to Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and Spain. AbeBooks will continue to operate under its own name.

I'm a big fan of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The genius of Murakami is in his discipline, focus and determination. I see him as a virtual Zen master - an embodiment of wisdom, passion, skills and exceptional will. The elements of his work and life story are inspirational and (here's where ReadWriteWeb comes in) particularly applicable when you're running a startup. Therefore in this post, we take a look at what modern technology startups can learn from this Japanese literary master.

Commuto puts an interesting spin on trading real world goods on the Internet. Clearly, it would be extremely hard for any start-up to be successful in this space when the likes of eBay and Craigslist having pretty much become synonymous with online trading already. Commuto, however, doesn't go head to head with these giants - instead, it focuses on local trades based on bartering.

There's no denying that browsing for books is much more fun in a bookstore rather than online, except if you have a Kindle. Walking through tons of shelves to find that perfect book can be pretty exciting. However, what if you just don't have the time or you don't feel like giving your legs the extra exercise? Zoomii, a virtual bookstore browsing service, may be just what you were looking for.

We all know what it looks like when a novel is adapted for film or television. But what would it look like when the novel format is adapted for the Internet? We reported in March that more and more reading is being done online, especially by the younger generation, but because of the distractions of the media rich world in which we live, most reading on the web is actually just skimming. So how do you create a compelling novel format for the online world? Canadian author Nicola Furlong thinks the answer is a new web publishing format she's calling a "Quillr."

Bookworms around the world have something to rejoice about today. The Borders bookstore, a competitor of Barnes and Nobles, has launched an online version of their storefront. You may recall Borders partnering with Amazon.com for online sales. Now it seems Borders is ready to step out on its own. Here's a look at what you'll find in Borders online.

You've probably heard people talking about the new "it" book: "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies." The book discusses the current trend of people using online social technologies like blogs, social networks, and podcasts, among other things, and how enterprise must learn to embrace these tools. Along with describing how the public's use of these technologies impacts businesses, the book also provides tools from Forrester to teach companies how to embrace social media as part of their business strategy.