“To Apple’s legion of admirers, the company is like a tech version of Wonka’s factory, an enigmatic but enchanted place that produces wonderful items they can’t get enough of. That characterization is true, but Apple also is a brutal and unforgiving place, where accountability is strictly enforced, decisions are swift, and communication is articulated clearly from the top. Fortune takes you around 1 Infinite Loop, inside Apple’s management structure, and into a world where CEO Steve Jobs doesn’t tolerate duds.”

So what do you think will happen when Apple and Amazon get together to discuss this problem? Can Apple make an exception because Amazon is so big? Will Amazon back down? Personally I don’t see either happening, but I suspect that Apple will not want to let the Kindle app leave the app store as well. Thoughts?

“Why do we hiccup? Is it possible to knock Earth out of its orbit? How do chameleons camouflage themselves? Do fish really have a three-second memory? How do barcodes work? Discover the answers to these and more in this captivating book of Amazing Answers To Curious Questions.

Dedicated to delivering in-depth knowledge about how the world around us works in an entertaining and engaging way, How It Works books are presented in a style that makes even the most complex of subjects fun and easy to understand. A worldwide phenomenon, How It Works books offer the most diverse and comprehensive way to feed the hungriest of enquiring minds.”

“There is no topic in the publishing industry this decade that is the source of as many misconceptions, superstitions, lies, plausible untruths, and idiocies as ebooks.”

“I was given a heads up about an article by my lovely wife yesterday about eBook piracy which I found online and proceeded to read, slightly disturbed.

I wasn’t surprised when I read it. Much like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) represents music companies, the Publishers Association represents the behemoths of the publishing industry (not the authors) – the ones with the vested interest in making sure everyone pays for what they’re reading.

Their boss recently said that people buying eBooks don’t actually own the book. “When you buy an e-book you are effectively buying a licence to view a file,” says Mollet. “Yes you’re buying the manifestation of the work but what you can then do with that file is a separate question.”

Eh? I want to say something very rude here, but I’ve restrained myself. What a load of tosh. He wouldn’t argue that I owned the paperback or hardback in my hand. How is the electronic version (which is more often than not locked into my devices) any less mine than the dead tree version.”

Don’t miss this chance to get your very own NOOK Wi-Fi®, which was Money Magazine’s Top Pick for E-Readers and was honored as Best Gadget of 2009 in the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards.

Figures for the first month of the new year show that E-book net sales increased by 115.8% vs January 2010 (from $32.4 Million to $69.9M). Sales of Downloadable Audio Books also rose by 8.8% vs the previous year ($6.0M to $6.5M). As AAP reported last month in its December 2010 monthly report and full 2010 analysis, E-book sales have increased annually and significantly in all nine years of tracking the category.

Among the other highlights of the January 2011 report:

* Total books sales on all platforms, in all categories, hit $805.7 Million for January. This was a slight drop from January 2010’s $821.5M sales (-1.9%).
* Adult Hardcover category fell from $55.4M to $49.1M (-11.3%), Adult Paperback dropped from $104.2M to $83.6 (-19.7%) and Adult Mass Market declined from $56.4M to $39.0 (-30.9%)
* In the Children’s/Young Adult category, Hardcover sales were $31.2M in January 2011 vs $31.8M in January 2010 (-1.9%) while Paperbacks were $25.4M, down 17.7% from $30.9M in January 2010.
* Physical Audio Books sales were $7.3M vs $7.9M the previous year (-6.7%).
* Sales of Religious Books grew by 5.6%, from $49.8M to $52.6M.
* Sales in the Higher Education category were $382.0M for January 2011, a slight drop (-1.4%) from $387.6M the previous year. K-12 sales hit $82.6M for the month vs $97.0M for the previous year (-14.9%).
* In Professional and Scholarly Books, sales grew 1.3%, from $51.2M to $51.8M. Sales of University Press Hardcovers were $3.9M in January 2011 vs $4.5M the previous year (-14.0%) while University Press Paperbacks were $6.2M vs $6.7M (-7.8%).

Self-publishing has traditionally been a surefire route to obscurity and dismal sales. Now a British thriller writer who sells his novels as ebooks for as little as 70p is proving the naysayers wrong.

Not only does Stephen Leather, Britain’s leading “independent” writer, estimate he has occupied the number one spot on Amazon.co.uk’s Kindle ebook bestseller lists for “90% of the last three months”, he is also selling “somewhere in the region” of 2,000 ebooks a day – and making big profits in the process.

Leather, who celebrated his seventh consecutive week at the top of the Amazon chart with his novella The Basement, about a serial killer in New York, also occupies fourth place with Hard Landing, another thriller, and 11th place with Once Bitten, a vampire novel.

He is one of many authors increasingly turning to ebooks as an alternative way to the top. Capitalising on the popularity of e-readers such as the Kindle, a new generation of writers is bypassing agents and publishers and using the flexible pricing model of ebooks to offer their work directly to the public at rock-bottom prices. Some, like Leather, are achieving huge sales, which, not surprisingly, is striking fear into publishers.

“On Wednesday, Borders – the venerable book retailer of four decades – filed for bankruptcy protection, a reality that leaves a gaping hole in the already-floundering world of print books and publications.”

From The Guardian- “Publishers entering books for the £50,000 Man Booker prize are now being asked to make all submissions available both as physical books and in digital form. This year’s judging panel – which includes writers Susan Hill, Matthew d’Ancona, and politician Chris Mullin as well as the Daily Telegraph’s head of books Gaby Wood, and is chaired by former M15 chief Stella Rimington – have been issued with e-readers. The move will help them prepare for the 2011 prize longlist, to be announced in July, without hauling around back-breaking numbers of submissions.”

eBooks. They’re going to kill reading, they’re going to be the saviour of reading and books and/or many other things that will probably never come true. One thing is fairly certain though….less trees will be felled in the years ahead and that surely must be an okay, at the very worst, thing?

I’ve been quite anti-eBooks in the past, not hugely anti in the sense that I view them as the great anti-Christ or anything along those lines but mainly because I always thought they represented less value in comparison to their printed counterparts.  My initial eBook foray experience being hugely soured by the awfulness that is eReader, Fictionwise and previous mobile apps on the likes of Palm Treos. The thought now makes me shudder of the hassle of buying books on these online stores and then trying to get them onto different mobile devices…yuk

Anyway, this is now 2011and several major innovations or switches in outlook have made it look like eBooks are now not only here to stay but here to expand. Exhibit number 1 being the Amazon Kindle which has grown from a fairly nice product into a fairly big player and is ably supported by its whole eco-system, this meaning Kindle apps being available for most of the major platforms (desktop and smartphone), the Kindle bookstore which now offers a lot of eBooks at mostly decent prices and a seamless (Apple-like) integration between the two. Buy a book via the Amazon web store and you can download it and read it on your iPhone, MacBook, Windows PC or wherever you can load the Kindle app to. Read it on your iPhone or Hero and then when you open your laptop at home the bookmark will have been synced to your PC so it opens on the last page read. Welcome to Smooth City……

So, having used and liked the Kindle app on my home mac and iPhone, certainly in preference to Apple’s iBooks alternative, and having received some Xmas Amazon vouchers I took the plunge and splashed out on a Kindle 3, the model that comes with the free 3G and wifi. I won’t bore you all with the specs or where the buttons are or what they do but instead I’ll just give some initial thoughts on the device, having now used it for almost a week. Overall, I really like it. The user experience, in terms of comparing it to the likes of Fictionwise and eReader, is on a different level. Buying books is easy once you have an Amazon account set up. When mine arrived and was opened up I was astonished to note that it was already called “Murray’s Kindle”……how did they do that? Not only that but it was already linked to my Amazon account.

Back to the user thoughts….my main gripe with the form factor is that both sides of the Kindle have largish buttons for getting to the next and previous pages. I assume this is to accommodate both left and right handed readers. Myself, being right-handed, would naturally use the buttons placed on the right hand side and at the same time would tend to hold the Kindle in my left hand, with my fingers holding, you’ve guessed it, the buttons on the left hand side with the direct result that for the first few days I was inadvertently pressing the page back and forward buttons when reading. I therefore have had to adjust the way that I hold it, which is a bit awkward as my fingers now have to sort of straddle the left hand side trying to avoid the buttons…not exactly natural but you get used to it. It’s also odd trying to get used to another non-touchscreended device and the initial temptation (and natural preference) is to try and use the screen for selecting menu items instead of the 5 way navigator button on the bottom of the front. Still, as the device is really to be used for reading books and that mostly involves just having to use the big buttons to turn the pages then you tend not to have to use the menu interface that much anyway. Nonetheless, the UI is a little clunky. You can reduce the clutter on the “home” page by setting up folders to house different genres of books, called “collections” but cannot, unfortunately, have further subdivisions within those collections.

Onto the good things now. I’ve bought about ten books in the last week and all were under £5. These included books that have become popular such as the Stieg Larsson “The Girl With The…” trilogy, all available for under £3 and a couple of books by Jo Nesbo, again available for under £4. Thus, I am forced to admit that one of my main preconceptions about eBooks being as expensive as their printed counterparts is probably largely incorrect. All the books purchased so far have been done via the Kindle itself and the experience was simple. Having the 3G version means I can browse the store when away from home, without wifi, and buy and download books on the spot. I thought this would be useful if I’m on holiday overseas, for example, and felt a sudden urge to buy a new book.

More plus points:

• it’s quite light and comfortable to hold for longer periods. I take it to work and read at lunchtime and take it with me when out and about too as it is relatively pocketable
• you can change the font size willy nilly for easier reading
• the screen is very readable in most light conditions (see below)
• you can also load on pdf format documents and these display surprisingly well to the extent that I have started to use the Kindle at work for showing clients information
• I’ve only charged it the once, on the day I got it and there is still what looks like about 80% charge left after a weeks use
• apparently, if I bought another Kindle through my Amazon account and gave it to my wife then she can read all the books I’ve bought too. Thus, book sharing (which we do with paperbacks) is entirely possible
• there are other features built in such as the browser and the ability to subscribe to “blogs” (although oddly this costs money) and magazines/newspapers too (also paid)
• built in “experimental” features includes the ability to play music and podcasts but I think these are just in the MP3 format (?)
• it is easy to add files by dragging and dropping them via USB connection on both Mac & Windows

Downsides apart from the two already mentioned?

• at times, I feel the Kindle could do with a backlight for the screen. There is an official Kindle case with light attached but it is £50…ouch
• it would be great if the screen was colour but that may well come in a future version
• this is silly but….I miss not being so sure how much of the book is left as you do with a paperback book

Overall though I am very pleased with the Kindle to date. It’s simple to run, has great battery life, a huge selection of available books at decent prices, is low maintenance and has a very readable screen in the majority of situations.

Murray.

I can’t quite say what makes it such a good eReader, but there are many things that bring it nearer to a book than a smartphone, Android tablet or the iPad could ever do. The screen looks like paper, the battery life is immense and the lightness and size means that it really can be carried anywhere. I wrote about this subject before Christmas and the following paragraph comes back to my mind- “I do agree with the reader’s comment and in particular with this one from another reader- “A novel is an immersive experience; the last thing the reader wants is to be interrupted.” That is a point I had not thought of before. Of course you can turn on Airplane Mode, but then you have to consider calendar alarms etc. and all of a sudden it doesn’t feel so much like a reading experience.”

As I said I cannot quite put my finger on it, but the Kindle has proved to be a much, much better eReader than the iPad for me and one that I will be using for all of my eBooks from now on. Just need to buy a case with a light on it for reading in bed…