From BiblioCrunch:

Are you tired of buying eBooks that are poorly formatted and designed? A lot of other readers are too. Proper interior design and packaging of an eBook is relatively easy and cheap compared to writing, editing, marketing, and the cover design of a book. However, eBooks on the market continue to have formatting errors that create reader outrage, even from major publishers. Compared to the technology in web browsers, eReading systems from Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Adobe, and Kobo are a bit behind the times. However, if you keep things simple in your layout and formatting, you will create a pleasant reading experience across all devices.

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Most of the vendors make you separately upload a cover that is massive in size (2500px in height is a good size to upload to most platforms). However, the cover you embed inside the eBook package typically does not need to be that large. 1024px in height is fine. Different eReading systems have different ways of rendering the cover. For the MOBI/KF8 format for Kindle, Amazon’s guidelines do not allow you to link to the cover in the Table of Contents for some reason. However, for EPUBs it is generally a good idea to create a separate cover page HTML file plus a link in the Table of Contents or else your cover won’t show up on Adobe Digital Editions.

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Generally, all you need on the Title Page for an eBook is the name of the book and the author. The text should almost always be centered. You can also include the publisher’s name and/or logo if you like and other contributors (e.g. the editor, the cover designer, etc.). Some authors like to put the edition (i.e. Kindle Edition, EPUB edition) and the copyright on the title page. Although, you can put this information on the copyright page instead—it’s a matter of preference. An important note for people uploading EPUBs to Smashwords, the title page must have a copyright statement and “Smashwords Edition” right below the copyright or your eBook will not get into Premium Status.

Link to the rest at BiblioCrunch

From Reuters:

The purchase price for Liquavista was not disclosed. Bloomberg News reported earlier this year that Samsung was seeking less than $100 million for the business.

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[In addition to its Fire tablets] Amazon is also testing and developing other gadgets, such as smart phones and an Internet-based set-top TV box, according to recent reports.

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Liquavista focuses on a technology called electrowetting, which it says makes displays clearer in all lighting conditions and can show video without using much power.

The technology can be used in mobile gadgets such as e-readers, smart phones, GPS devices, portable media players and cameras. Over the long term, electrowetting can be used in larger display products such as laptops and TVs, Liquavista said on its website.

Link to the rest at Reuters and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

From Techdirt:

We’ve never quite understood the purpose behind DRM, and have said so many times. It doesn’t stop infringement, because the DRM is always cracked, and the crack always leads to a clean version. And once you have a clean version, it’s available everywhere. Those who want to infringe will do so. So, in the end, the only thing DRM does is (1) annoy legitimate buyers and (2) lock in certain platforms such that the ebook platform providers (hello Amazon!) have much more power than the publishers.

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[A] blog post from Tor UK talking about the impact one year later with the key line being:

As it is, we’ve seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles, despite them being DRM-free for nearly a year.

Given the point we made above, this is hardly surprising. In fact, it seems almost silly to look at all the fears some had about the move to DRM-free. In fact, it looked like Tor was a lot more worried about it than its authors. As the blog post notes, when it carefully approached its authors, including some best sellers, they were eager to support the move, with many applauding the publisher for taking that step, rather than being anti-consumer.

Link to the rest at Techdirt and thanks to Elizabeth for the tip.

From Mashable:

Innovation in the mobile phone space, for many of us, means the latest smartphone or tablet from Apple or Samsung. But for millions of people in the developing world, simpler developments for feature phones — the type you probably haven’t used in half a decade — can be an education game changer and a tool for empowerment.

Non-profit Worldreader has brought more than half a million e-books to children in Africa via the 10,000 Kindles it’s distributed. After a one-year pilot program, the organization has launched Worldreader Mobile, a way for any feature phone user with a 2G connection to read more than 1,400 books for free.

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Through 2G networks, Worldreader pushes classic titles available through Creative Commons — think Pride and Prejudice and Nancy Drew — onto its users’ phones. It recently begun adding local African materials, which has caused an immediate surge in readership. Hindi and Bengali titles for the large Indian user base are coming through the pipeline.

During the pilot, readers in Nigeria, India, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, among other countries, have gotten hooked on reading. The Worldreader Mobile app has been downloaded onto 4 million feature phones, and there are more than half a million active users, who use the app at least 20 times each month.

Link to the rest at Mashable

From Engadget:

[Kobo] has announced a new reader that once again rethinks the standard 6-inch screen. With the Aura HD, Kobo is going big, extending things to 6.8 inches, putting it closer to tablet size. With that upgrade comes an impressive resolution: 1,440 x 1,080 (compared to the 1,024 x 768 on the Paperwhite and 1,024 by 758 on the Glo). It’s a product focused on hardcore readers. “We got 10,000 customers together across dozens of countries to ask them what we can do for them,” Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis explained. As such, it’s a limited edition offering, one not destined to replace the flagship Glo.

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The Aura HD is a new form factor for Kobo, a large-format reader with a high-res, 6.8-inch screen, but it’s a size the company has no intention of extending beyond the end of the year. Of course, if the device proves a runaway success, Kobo would certainly be amenable to rolling out a larger-screened device as a mainstream product. “If we hear from our customers that this is the best thing since sliced bread,” says Serbinis, “it’s going to be hard for us not to listen to that.” In the meantime, there’s a fair chance the added bulk and price will be enough to doom the product to the world of niche devices.

Link to the rest at Engadget

Passive Guy wonders why Kobo spent the money to create and launch a limited edition ereader. Perhaps the company had already sunk a bunch of cash into the device but then concluded that tablets were the wave of the future. It does feel awkward.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Reading on a tablet device won’t damage your eyes, Dr. Sheedy says. His team has studied various fonts, computer displays and pixel resolutions, and found the difference in effect on the eye between reading e-ink and the printed word to be negligible.

He adds that pixel density and screen resolution have reached the point at which the eye doesn’t know which it is seeing. So if reading a printed book in dim light is fine, so is reading a Kindle or iPad.

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“Ever wonder why a pirate wears patches? It’s not because he was wounded in a sword fight,” says Dr. Sheedy. Seamen must constantly move between the pitch black of below decks and the bright sunshine above.

Smart pirates “wore a patch over one eye to keep it dark-adapted outside.” Should a battle break out and the pirate had to shimmy below, he would simply switch the patch to the outdoor eye and he could see in the dark right away—saving him 25 minutes of flailing his cutlass about in near blindness.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire)

From Good EReader:

In 2010, Neelie Kroes became the Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe. She has been a staunch advocate of eBooks and their accessibility for all citizens. She gave a talk in Salon du Livre, yesterday on the future of publishing in Europe.

Publishing in Europe has a long and storied history, for hundreds of years many companies have been in business producing some of the great literary works. Modern companies are facing a crisis because they are failing to adapt to the digital landscape that is starting to catch on in a big way. She mentioned “I know some see the advent of digital as a threat to the sector. But for me the biggest risk is that we fail to take advantage of new possibilities. Unless we embrace the future, the sector will for sure fall behind, overtaken by more forward-looking and dynamic parts of the world; overtaken by those who can look ahead and grasp the future. Then we will let down our economy, our people, and our cultural heritage. And as it stands we are not sufficiently taking advantage. We are not taking enough risks. In the US, eBooks are about one quarter of book sales; in only one European country does that figure go above 2%.”

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Neelie thinks that publishers have to think bigger then they are.”When competing with the American giants, piecemeal national initiatives won’t cut it. We need to think European to compete globally. Specifications and standards can help: for example, by supporting interoperability and portable eBooks. ePub is just one example. Most readers expect to be able to access their books in whichever country they are, and on whatever device they choose; if European publishers can’t meet those expectations, consumers will vote with their wallets; or go to the big American companies who can offer that kind of scale.”

European licensing remains a murky issue, for hundreds of years publishers have been printing books in their own countries and seldom exporting. Most scenes in France, Spain and Germany don’t translate that well to other countries and seldom do they see localization for your average title. Being able to market your books and gain the necessary permissions of the publishers to sell digital content to any country in Europe is something the industry has to strongly consider to develop a cohesive solution. There is also many different variations of VAT.

Link to the rest at Good EReader

From The Verge:

Craig Mod is a writer and designer who splits his time between Japan and the US. Formerly of Flipboard, much of his writing is concerned with ebooks and digital publishing — the pitfalls the industry falls into, and how best to avoid them.

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S: You once wrote about the minimal style of Japanese book covers. It seems like that kind of aesthetic is something that would really translate to digital.

C: I think it will. I think part of the reason why you didn’t see Kindle take off here as quickly as it did in the West is that the Kindle is a non-Japanese company, Any outside platform disrupting an entire industry is going to have a hard time getting in — they’re not going to make it easy. Publishers aren’t going to bend over backwards to license their content to Kindle. Amazon’s been negotiating for years to get out here.

So, I don’t know, I think it’s an inevitability, and I think that the the port has been opened, so to speak. Just sitting here even an hour ago, a businessman, maybe in his 40s, 50s, was reading his manga on an iPad mini. I don’t know, I think nostalgia is very quickly replaced with convenience. I think in a year or two from now, we’ll probably see a lot of digital book activity here in Japan.

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You know, sometimes when you’re so close to a medium, as we all are — to books, to the way magazines work, and the way distribution works for physical things, and the way publication cycles are for physical things — and then a new device comes out that requires you to take a step back and disconnect from everything that’s part of the incumbent industry, it can take a little while to create the proper distance.

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S: So whatever hardware any of those companies chooses, they’re tied to whatever OEMs can produce. Do you think there’s any limitations to the reading experience by the technology of today? Is there any advance that you think we would need to see?

C: I’d love to see E Ink be as responsive and fluid as what we have here on the iPad mini. I’ve stopped using my Kindle entirely now that I’ve got the mini.

I got my Paperwhite before the mini, and there are a few usability problems with the touch Kindles that drive me nuts. The E Ink, you never know what’s happening when you swipe, there’s no grounding, there’s no — did we just move right, or did we just move left?

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For example, social reading inside of Kindle. I would love to be able to do a small reading group with a few friends, I’d love to be able to say “Hey, Sam, let’s read this book about this weird technology together,” and we can go in there, and I open the book and it shows me where you are in the book, you almost race each other along the length of the book, you can drop notes for each other, you can highlight, I can see exactly what you’ve really spent time digging into, and the only reason we can’t do that is because the Kindle ecosystem is locked up.

You have some startups that are trying to fix that: guys like Readmill are trying to build better social reading platforms, but there are business development problems. How do you get access to all of Random House’s backlog? Developing that relationship, and getting access to that firehose is a non-trivial problem, so it makes it hard for startups to innovate in that space.

So, no, I mean all limitations in reading and publishing, journalism, magazine publishing, book publishing, it’s all about systems, ecosystems, tools. It’s so hard for a publisher to put out a digital book, it so hard! Why is it so hard for a publisher to put out a digital book? Creating an .epub is still freakishly difficult to do it well, and to feel like you understand what’s happening under the hood and you have control over the final output.

Link to the rest at The Verge

From Publishers Weekly:

At a time when many independent booksellers both here and abroad are beginning to gain traction selling Kobo e-books, other retailers are eyeing the secondary market for e-books and other digital content. Boston-based ReDigi, which opened a used digital music storefront in late 2011, may have gotten there first, but megaretailer Amazon isn’t far behind.

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There’s still one obstacle for ReDigi to overcome, at least in the U.S: a lawsuit that Capitol Records filed in January 2012 claiming that ReDigi is violating copyright. Capitol called ReDigi “a clearinghouse for copyright infringement,” rejecting the idea that it is the digital equivalent of a used CD store. That doesn’t worry founder, president, and CEO John Ossenmacher, who is moving forward with plans for expansion both in the U.S. and in Europe. The only concession that the technology entrepreneur has made, at the advice of the company’s attorney, is to keep the ReDigi.com site in beta until the suit is settled. Ossenmacher said that because the case is so technical, ReDigi elected for trial by judge, but he never realized that it could take three months and counting for Judge Richard J. Sullivan of U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York to reach a decision.

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One of the reasons that Ossenmacher, who was recently appointed to the Congressional Internet Caucus’s Advisory Committee, is optimistic he will prevail is that ReDigi uses a so-called “verification engine” to determine whether a given song, or soon an e-book, has been legally downloaded and can be resold. And it provides an “atomic transaction” that transfers content without copying it. “With ReDigi’s method,” states Ossenmacher, “only the ‘original’ good is instantaneously/atomically transferred from seller to buyer, without any copies. ReDigi then assists the seller with an antivirus-like software application that monitors the seller’s computer and synced devices to ensure that any personal-use copies of the sold good are removed.” By contrast, the patent obtained by Amazon appears to rely on a “copy-and-delete” mechanism, which is at the heart of the Capitol suit (Amazon didn’t respond to PW’s queries).

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From Good Ereader:

“Books aren’t just text and images anymore,” claims Inkling’s introduction to its new Habitat platform, a cloud-based concept that allows an entire team of creators working from anywhere to see how their content comes together for publication on multiple devices. “There’s never been a more exciting time to be in publishing.”

While any number of digital publishers are creating interactive, full-featured content, Inkling has incorporated one-click publication to a wide variety of devices. Where publishers once had to focus on one market, typically iOS, in order to reach as wide an audience of users for the effort as possible, Inkling Habitat integrates the capability of formatting the team’s content for all markets.

One of the stumbling blocks for digital publishers that originally led them to focus on one vast market of consumers was discoverability, an issue that many app developers still holds them back since app stores can feel like the proverbial haystack for content. Inkling’s new platform fights back with Content Discovery Platform (CDP) that uses the books themselves as search engine-enabled tools for customer searches.

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UPDATE by Paul Biba: I was able to attend the Inkling press conference last night (embargoed ’till today). The first thing that many participants commented on was how well-funded Inkling must be. The conference was in a expensive location and it was clear that no expense was spared to make it elegant. The use of Habitat will be free to any publishers who make their books available on Inkling and everyone I talked to had nothing but praise for Inkling and the technology they developed.

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Habitat will allow, for example, a college’s Art History department to collaborate and create their own art history textbook, freezing the publishers out of the market and allowing for easily tailoring the textbook to the department’s curriculum. They said that they expect the platform to be producing textbooks in the the states of California and New York quite soon.

Link to the rest at Good Ereader