For more than a decade, the visually-impaired have been locked in an excruciatingly slow and circuitous battle against US copyright laws.

Possible book-review candidate.

In my last column I discussed the various problems that I have with ebooks for academic libraries. Now I’d like to lay out what I want from library ebooks and what it would take for me to switch from print to electronic as the preferred format for books.

A few years ago, after the disclosure that Amazon was collecting and storing user data associated with the loan of library e-books to Kindle users, I wrote an article briefly exploring the “digital dilemma” associated with providing users access to E-books and Privacy …. Again.

CHICAGO — The American Library Association (ALA) decries confirmed reader data breaches by Adobe and calls for immediate corrective action to encrypt and protect reader information. The plain text

The publishing world may finally be facing its “rootkit scandal.” Two independent reports claim that Adobe’s e-book software, “Digital Editions,” logs every document readers add to their local

It came to light on Monday that the latest version of Adobe Digital Editions is sending metadata on ebooks that are read through the application to an Adobe server — in clear text. I’ve perso…

Digital Editions even tracks which pages you've read. It might break a New Jersey Law.

Librarians caution that we are tumbling toward a digital memory hole in which large portions of our literary heritage could one day be lost altogether.

E-book prices seem entirely reasonable now, but once a library signs on, it must continually pay the rising subscription fee or the books will just vanish.

TechCrunch has learned that Apple has made another acquisition, one that it is using to boost its e-books effort and "beat Amazon at its own game." It has bought BookLamp, a startup based out of Boise, Idaho, that developed big data-style book analytics services. A second source says Apple bought BookLamp's employees and technology for a price that was "higher than $10 million, and lower than $15 million."  BookLamp's most well-known product was the Book Genome Project, a platform that let users find suggestions for books to read based on natural language analysis of other titles. BookLamp's tech and talent could help Apple improve its iBooks service with better recommendations, search, and categorization.

I’m having a Groundhog Day moment, here. Indies are getting screwed. Exclusivity is death for authors. We are in coach and Big 5 authors are in first class. Our pay is going down. The same discussion exploded on KBoards back in 2011. They were the Kindle Boards at the time, and self-publishing was a lot more stigmatized than it is today. Amazon launched a program called KDP Select, and if you went exclusive with them, you gained two marketing advantages: Your ebooks became part of the Kindle Lending Library, and…Continue reading "It’s 2011 All Over Again"

Self-publishers get screwed in Amazon's subscription scheme.

Amazon’s war on publishers reached a crescendo yesterday with the leak of Kindle Unlimited, a subscription plan that would allow readers to pay $9.99 per month for unlimited access to the Kindle ebook library. No longer content with simply demanding steeper discounts from publishers like Hachette — which is locked in a bitter fight with the ecommerce giant over book prices — Amazon is finally reaching its end goal: the complete dissolution of the traditional book business model through a vertically-integrated publishing platform, from writer to Kindle.

"The everything store" was never the extent of Amazon's ambition. Jeff Bezos has built a business that is, ultimately, about offering every kind of access to every kind of thing. You can buy shoes...