Thursday Midday Links: Thinking of Buying a Dorchester Book?
Barnes and Noble is going to be selling the nook in Wal-mart stores next to the iPad starting October 24, 2010. The wifi iPad will also be offered in Verizon stores beginning October 28. Be careful of the “packages” that Verizon is offering because there doesn’t seem to be much of a savings. BN has also sent out invitations for a special event next week. Nate from theDigital Reader suggests that there is a new large screen device to pair with the previously launched nookstudy.
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If you are a Starbucks fan, you might be interested in a new Starbucks Digital Venture that presents a digital network for customers containing movies, books, etc.
A feature called the Bookish Reading Club offers a rotating selection of digital titles from publishers Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster. People can read the books -‘ sometimes the entire text, sometimes an excerpt -‘ in their browser via an HTML5 reader while on the network.
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Borders presents its own self publishing service for ebooks. BN readers complain about the influx of BN’s self publishing ebooks through PubIt.
Please can we have a search function that allows us to filter out Pubit books if we wish? I have been using the new releases tab in ebooks to browse and find mystery books I want to buy – but I am finding that I now get floods of Pubit books. Many of these are not even classified sensibly – should “Age of Information” really be showing up in the mystery/thriller category or Jane Austen books in science fiction?
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Forbes has followed up on the FTC Guidelines for bloggers and has found few cases being investigated. Of course, this doesn’t mean that bloggers should forget that the guidelines exist.
"Not everyone's going to obey the law," Engle adds. "People will always use shills. Where we see actions we think are egregious, we'll bring action."
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Dorchester is apparently having problems getting books for which it does not hold the rights taken off of online retailers. Authors and at least one agent have sent letters regarding what they view to be the unlawful sale (and in some cases giving away) books that Dorchester no longer holds the rights for and received no response from Dorchester. The timelines is very sad but basically a month of sales/giveaways has occurred for at least two former Dorchester authors: Jana DeLeon and Leslie Langtry. Fortunately for those authors, the copyright law affords them the highest civil protection: Strict liability, treble damages, and attorneys’ fees. Dorchester might not have any money but if Amazon, BN, etc are ignoring DMCA takedown notices, a case could be made against those two healthy companies.
In the comments, Chris Keeslar shows up and wags the angry finger at Sarah for failing to follow up with Dorchester and him for comment. I think Keeslar’s responses should be directed toward the authors who claim over a month of silence and non response. When you buy a Dorchester book, you may want to think about what is going on there.
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Hard Case Crime used to be with Dorchester but with the changes (going digital and then trade print later), Hard Case looked for a new publisher and distributor. Titan Publishing is a UK based publishing and it has plans to acquire all existing stock of the Hard Case Crime and will be publishing future books under that imprint.
I quit doing new release searches at B&N a long time ago because of the lack of filter for PubIt titles.