May 20 2012
Introduction I’ve talked to several readers about the price fixing lawsuit and people have a lot of questions. I thought I could provide a few answers here to help clarify matters. If you have a question, drop a line in the comments. 1. What are the lawsuits and who do they involve? There are three [...]
May 6 2012
Last week, Laura Hazard Owen of Paid Content tabulated that about 500,000 digital copies of Harry Potter have been sold since their release on March 27, 2012. Harry Potter series have reportedly sold 450 million copies in print. Despite those record breaking print sales prior to the official digital release and that there were illegal digital [...]
Apr 29 2012
In the past two weeks, we’ve seen two publishers engage in some experimental changes in the way they sell digital books. Sourcebooks launched a DRM free subscription site and TOR/FORGE announced it would be selling DRM free digital books beginning this summer. Traditional publishers have been quietly moving toward digital first programs for a couple [...]
Apr 22 2012
Purpose of the Antitrust Law This article is to lay out, in simplest terms, antitrust law as it pertains to the publishing price fixing lawsuit. It is not designed to address the shortcomings of the law or the need for reform but the status of the law. Additionally, my knowledge of the antitrust law is [...]
Apr 15 2012
One thing that I’ve heard repeatedly from any publisher is that Amazon is a bad business partner. It doesn’t matter if the publisher is an agency pricing publisher or a low priced digital only publisher. Amazon treats everyone poorly. Amazon needs competition. Amazon has no motivation to keep prices low, innovate their retail site, improve [...]
Apr 8 2012
Last week included April Fool’s Day and sometimes crazy things can happen on April Fool’s Day. To prevent crazy things from adversely impacting your ebook reading, make sure you are backing up your ebook files. There are three primary ways to backup for your ebooks. Cloud storage There are more than a dozen cloud storage options [...]
Mar 11 2012
Last week, news came out that the Justice Department was readying a petition to sue five of the largest publishing houses in North America along with Apple for colluding together to maintain artificially high prices for digital books. This was initially instituted in January 2010 after Macmillan pulled its entire digital catalog from Amazon unless [...]
Mar 4 2012
With over 400,000 apps in the Android Market it can be tough finding the right apps for your device. For reading books I find myself primarily using Kindle for Android and Mantano, but what about apps for other things? Below are a few non-reading apps that I’ve found I use all the time on either [...]
Feb 19 2012
Two of the largest technical publishing book conferences have just finished their sessions as of last week, Digital Book World in January and Tools of Change this past week. I attended neither but I paid attention to the articles and tweets that were written of and around the conferences. There did not appear to be [...]
Feb 12 2012
Introduction I received an email from Sarah who had received an email from one of her readers wondering what to do when her harddrive crashed and she had to reformat. Because of DRM, moving away from your existing system because of a system failure or simply upgrading your computer can be fraught with problems. The [...]
Feb 5 2012
Quick Reference Table Return Redownload CS Form Live Chat Email Phone Amazon Y, 7 days Y Y Y Y Y Barnes & Noble N Y Y Y N Y Kobo N Y Y N N Y Sony N Y Y N N Y Diesel Y, b4 dl’d Y Y N N Y Fictionwise Y, b4 [...]
Jan 29 2012
Everyday more and more folks are getting Android based phones and tablets. For readers these devices can be a great way to read both on the go and in a more relaxed setting. The problem comes when looking for reading apps. There are so many out there and searching the Android Market often dosn’t give [...]
Jan 22 2012
Intro Now that you have your Calibre database set up just the way you like it, you need to figure out how to get the books from your computer to your device. You can use the tethered or the over the air (untethered) method. Tethered Tethered means to physically attach your device to your computer [...]
Jan 15 2012
Part two of settling up a new library with Calibre. The first can be found here for plugins and metadata. Once you have the books entered into your library, you can then manipulate the data. Calibre now allows you to create your own custom columns. Calibre comes with columns for Title, Title Sort, Author, Author Sort, [...]
Jan 8 2012
Introduction I am a huge fan of the free open source software written by Kovid called Calibre. It is an organization, management, conversion tool for both print and digital books. I’ve had several people email me asking what the best set up is for Calibre along with what plugins that they should download. The following is [...]
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