power reading... with 2013 Man Booker Prize judge Natalie Haynes

Why do e-book outfits love the letter 'K'? (Part 1)

From: Sesame Street
via The Official Cranberries Fanblog

"Looking to keep pace with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and the fast growing self-publishing market in general, Barnes & Noble is phasing out its PubIt! self-publishing service and relaunching it as Nook Press, an upgraded e-book self-publishing platform offering an array of new services to authors and publishers. B&N is partnering with the self-publishing platform Fast Pencil to supply Nook Press with its proprietary online authoring technology, while also offering Fast Pencil authors access to a variety of marketing opportunities via B&N’s Nook platform. […]

     Much like PubIt!, Nook Press will pay authors up to 65% of the e-book list price based on how much an author wants to charge for a book. The Nook Press platform is nonexclusive (authors and publishers can sell the e-book where they want) and, like PubIt!, Nook Press is free of charge and B&N takes a percentage of the list price when the books sell."
— Publishers Weekly
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Oops, sorry... wrong "Kobo" (photo from: kapok.com)

"Kobo, a small Canadian ebook and e-reading company now owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, kicked Google’s butt… when it comes to selling ebooks through independent bookstores, that is. […]
     The reason the program existed in the first place was to give independent bookstores a way to get involved in the growing market of ebooks and digital reading, to give them a chance to survive the ebook revolution.
     After Google announced that it was cancelling its program this past spring, Kobo swooped in and signed a deal with the American Booksellers Association to provide e-readers, tablets and ebooks for them to sell.
     In the first month of the Kobo partnership (Oct. last year), independent bookstores sold more ebooks than in the entire two years working with Google. The key, say bookstore owners, is being able to sell the devices along with the ebooks. It just makes more sense to customers."
— Jeremy Greenfield, Forbes
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Write-By-Numbers

From: Above & Beyond

"In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them. For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.
     The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. [...]
     Pinpointing the moment when readers get bored could also help publishers create splashier digital editions by adding a video, a Web link or other multimedia features [Jim Hilt, Barnes & Noble's vice president of e-books] says. Publishers might be able to determine when interest in a fiction series is flagging if readers who bought and finished the first two books quickly suddenly slow down or quit reading later books in the series. [...]
     Others worry that a data-driven approach could hinder the kinds of creative risks that produce great literature. 'The thing about a book is that it can be eccentric, it can be the length it needs to be, and that is something the reader shouldn't have anything to do with,' says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 'We're not going to shorten 'War and Peace' because someone didn't finish it.'"
—Alexandra Alter, The Wall Street Journal
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