Yes, physical books may still have their place in our new digital society, but more and more kids are turning to tablets, computers, and e-readers. With Storia, Scholastic is creating an entire e-book ecosystem that is complete with an app, as well as the e-book store itself. Interestingly, the ebooks sold through Storia look like they’re exclusive to Scholastic, not unlike many of the physical books they have sold over the years.

The beta version of the e-reading app for Windows has launched and the iPad version should be going live a little later this month. You get five free ebooks when you download the app and you have access to (buy) over 1,000 more ebooks through the Storia store. The official launch is slated for the back to school season in the fall, at which time there will be over 2,000 titles available, as well as apps for Mac, Android, and iPhone.

[Source]

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“Our philosophy is simple,” wrote Steve Jobs in a Feb. 15 release. “When Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30% share. When the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100% and Apple earns nothing.”
That seems fair from Apple’s perspective.

The problem is that 30 per cent of each sale is as much or more than many companies take in commissions or profit. ”The crux of the matter is that Apple is now requiring us, as well as all other ebook sellers, to give them 30% of the selling price of any ebook that we sell from our iOS app,” read a post on the iFlow blog prior to shutting their doors at the end of May. “Unfortunately, because of the ‘agency model’ that has been adopted by the largest publishers, our gross margin on ebooks after paying the wholesaler is less than 30%, which means that we would have to take a loss on all ebooks sold. This is not a sustainable business model.

“The key point here is that all sellers now get a 30% commission and Apple now wants a 30% fee, which is all of our gross margin and then some.”  Rhapsody agrees. The company’s president John Irwin claimed in February that “[adding] Apple’s 30% will exceed the revenue on our product…It’s not a matter of making less money, it would be zero profit.”  Last night, Kobo sent out a newsletter to its subscribers warning that their next update would remove the ability to shop from within their reader app, asking for any feedback to pass along to Apple. “In order to conform with new rules imposed by Apple,” read the newsletter, “our customers [will no longer have] the ability to shop from within our app.  “Please share your feedback on this latest change on our blog so that we may share with Apple or share directly with Apple at http://www.apple.com/contact/feedback.html.”

The general buzz? This decision has the potential to put every small ebook and music distributor on iOS out of business, and deter others from starting up at all. Electronic sales through app-embedded shops are no longer profitable for anyone except Apple.
What do you say? Should Apple drop the 30% in-app sales fee, lower it to say, 10 or 15% or keep it the way it is? Weigh in with your comment below.

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Last year, for every 100 paperback books sold on Amazon.com, the company sold 115 e-books, according to Amazon’s Q4 earnings report. What’s more, Amazon saw three times as many sales of e-books than of hardcovers during the same period.

“This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition,” said Amazon. “Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher.”

Amazon hasn’t specified exactly how many of its latest Kindle devices it sold last year, but analysts are estimating about 7 million.

“The Company sold millions of third-generation Kindle devices with the new advanced paper-like Pearl e-ink display in the fourth quarter,” says Amazon, “and the third-generation Kindle eclipsed ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ as the bestselling product in Amazon’s history.”

It wasn’t many years ago that people scoffed at the idea of e-books overtaking paperbacks in sales and popularity, but that day has come.

Let us know which of the two you prefer – e-readers or paper books – in the comments section.

[Business Insider via Amazon]

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Ebooks are doing great business, and this is not an exaggerated claim. Surveys conducted by market research firm Forrester show that the already massive ebook business is likely to do even better in the times to come. Forrester surveyed nearly 4000 people and the findings showed that they purchased ebooks worth $ 996 million this year. Though only 7% of the total surveyed populace bothered to actually ‘read’ the ebooks in entirety, the bucks spent by them clearly show the tremendous rise in popularity of ebooks.

Shocked? Wait, there’s more to come. The survey reflected that the ardent book lovers did 41% of their reading in digital format. Surely the numbers are impressive, but this popularity of ebooks doesn’t denote a similar rise in power of ebook readers. A good number of ebook lovers prefer to use their laptop for reading, and, just in case you are a number-cruncher, those using a reader are divided in the following manner:

• 32% on Amazon’s Kindle
• 15% on Apple iPhone
• 12% on Sony e-Reader
• 10% on netbooks

Beyond that, Kindle users rely on ebooks most dominantly (a whopping 66% of them read in digital form). That’s no shocking discovery to me!

So having nearly touched the billion dollar mark, ebooks have established themselves as a force to reckon with and killed any doubts in the skeptic mind. What next? Well with the awe-inspiring profits, more publishers are expected to turn to ebooks, giving you and me more of reading pleasure.

Source: Engadget

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Kobo is launching the Kobo WiFi edition, adding wireless connectivity to the tiny e-reader and giving it a price drop. But is it enough to keep Kobo in the e-book game? The company launched the Kobo software for mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, Mac, PC, Linux and soon BlackBerry PlayBook. The Kobo software would require you to download your purchases to the computer via the Kobo app, then transfer them to the Kobo reader via Bluetooth, USB or SD card. So adding WiFi is a logical extension, but still with no keyboard searching for exactly what you want will involve flipping and clicking through dozens of titles and viewing listings by either category or alphabetically.

When the Kobo first came out I took a good look at it, the software was sluggish, but the new Kobo WiFI should address that concern with 2x faster processor, making page turns and navigation faster than before – the same as the Kindle says Kobo. Other upgrades include longer battery life, sharper eInk screen for reading and a dictionary built in to quickly look up definitions.

Kobo WiFi sells for $140 USD ($149 CAD) and comes in Black, Pearlized Onyx and Silver. Its available now for pre-order and will ship October 5th via KoboBooks.

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That dual 14.1-inch Kno tablet unveiled earlier this month has just been slimmed down to a single screen model. The reasoning? It will be “absolutely cheaper than the dual screen version,” according to CEO of Kno, Osman Rashid who spoke at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference earlier today.

Kno still has plans to release the sub-$1000 dual screen version, so today’s announcement is an addition to the Kno family, not a revision. Kno has McGraw Hill, Pearson and Wiley on board for textbook publishing and plans to take the electronic textbook market by storm. The device is designed to make textbook pages fit perfectly while seamlessly flipping from page to page. With their custom software to “normalize” books into PDF format, Kno should have a large database of ebooks to offer very quickly.

The company plans to have their own bookstore similar to Apple’s iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle. But the Kno is not just a reading device, with a touchscreen display students can take notes and annotate in the margins at an incredible speed thanks to the Nvidia Tegra processor. Availability has yet to be announced.

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Among the $55 million raised, a solid $46 million is put forth by Andreessen Horowitz, championed by Marc Andreessen. Marc is so enthusiastic about Kno that he’s calling it the “most powerful tablet anyone has ever seen.” Kno CEO Osman Rashid isn’t forthcoming about the price, but he says this puppy will be less than four figures; $999?

The Kno device will be the first dual-screen tablet computer and they’re saying that it will be a “total product,” encompasing software, hardware, and services. That sounds a lot like the Apple approach, but it seems the Kno is being targeted at the college crowd. Students can download and read textbooks directly, as well as take notes and draw on pages.

Rashid is also saying that Kno-provided textbooks, which look awfully like what the Microsoft Courier concept was trying to pull off. Regardless, it will be cheaper than the dead tree editions, which usually average about $100 each. That all sounds good, but one of the many challenges will be getting the textbook publishers to jump on board. I’m sure the Kindle, Kobo, iBooks, and other folks are itching for that kind of a deal too.

Kno Movie from Kno, Inc. on Vimeo.

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Barnes & Noble now offering Nook app to Android OS smartphones

When it comes to the Amazon Kindle, you don’t necessarily have to buy the e-reader hardware in order to enjoy its library. There are all sorts of free mobile apps. The same thing is expanding with Barnes & Noble too with the introduction of the nook for Android app. As you can probably figure out, this Google Android app will grant you access to just about everything that the Barnes & Noble nook has to offer. You’ll need to have Android 1.6 or higher, but it means that you can shop for over a million titles including new releases and free eBooks.

The app — which works on devices like the Motorola Droid and HTC EVO 4G — will automatically sync to your last page read, presumably across the different platforms of reading if you have the app on your iPad or BlackBerry too. You can also change the font style and font size, flipping pages with a “flick of your finger.” The best part about, you can “lend” a book to your friends. The LendMe technology for sharing only supports eBooks, for newspapers and magazines, you’re going to have to pay the piper yourself.

To install the NOOK app, follow the steps below, if we had a QR code for it we’d give it to ya:

[Barnes & Noble]

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