Last.fm for Books
Spiegel Online has an interesting article about Readmill, a new start-up with the goal of making book reading a “more social” activity: The goal is to transform book reading into a social activity, bringing together readers via their e-readers, and to grab a share of the booming E-book market. Other companies ...
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Amazon's Table: Just Like the Kindle, Only Bigger and With Less Books Stuff
I’ll be interested to see what Amazon’s table is all about when it comes out, but I have to admit, as someone who still reads and actually likes books, I’m a bit wary . . . The New York Times has an interesting piece about this that highlights the contradictions surrounding this device. On the one ...
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"Here's My Million Dollar Idea: A Sort of Spotify for Books"
For those of you who listen to our (semi) weekly Three Percent podcast, you may remember a discussion Tom and I had a month or so ago about the idea of a “Spotify for books,” whereby someone could subscribe to have unlimited access to all ebooks available on a given platform. As with Spotify, you wouldn’t ...
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Open Letter's $4.99 Ebook Pricing
As we announced last week, for the rest of June, all nine of our ebooks will be available for $4.99/title—a pretty good bargain, especially since they’ll go back to the standard $9.99 on July 1st . . . You can find info about all our available ebooks by clicking here here. (In case anyone’s interested, ...
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Can S&S, Penguin, and Hachette Recommend the Best Books?
As mentioned before, I’m obsessed interested in the ways in which readers find books—especially in the New Digital Reality of Facebook comments and whatnot. The idea of a “Pandora for Books” (or maybe better, a “Last.fm for Books”) has been batted around for sometime now, and apparently a ...
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DiscoverReads, Let Downs, and "Books"
As written about in today’s New York Times GoodReads (which has come a bit of an obsession of mine) has just launched a new site called DiscoverReads that uses an algorithm to recommend books. (Book recommendations and how people choose what to read is another obsession of mine, so this announcement is like a double ...
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Do These Numbers Even Make Sense?
Now, it’s nothing new for Amazon.com to release sales information without any actual hard numbers (how many Kindles have been sold?), but this announcement in The Bookseller begs a explanation: Amazon.com customers have bought more Kindle e-books than both hardback and paperback books combined for the top 10, 25, ...
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