Amazon.com and the “Big Five” publishers — Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster — have been accused of colluding to fix ebook prices, in a class action filed by the law firm that successfully sued Apple and the Big Five on the same charge 10 years ago. The Guardian reports: The lawsuit, filed in district court in…
Tag: eBook
Your Computer Isn’t Yours
Security researcher Jeffrey Paul, writes in a blog post: On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored. It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique…
Publishers Worry As Ebooks Fly Off Libraries’ Virtual Shelves
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: After the pandemic closed many libraries’ physical branches this spring, checkouts of ebooks are up 52 percent from the same period last year, according to OverDrive, which partners with 50,000 libraries worldwide. Hoopla, another service that connects libraries to publishers, says 439 library systems in the US and Canada have joined since March,…
Cory Doctorow Crowdfunds His New Audiobook to Protest Amazon/Audible DRM
Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow (also a former EFF staffer and activist) explains why he’s crowdfunding his new audiobook online. Despite the large publishers for his print editions, “I can’t get anyone to do my audiobooks. Amazon and its subsidiary Audible, which controls 90% of the audiobook sales, won’t carry any of my audiobooks because I won’t let them put any…
An Amazon Ad Prompted Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller To Block In-App Purchases of Kindle Books On iOS
According to a collection of internal emails recently released by lawmakers, as part of the House Judiciary Committee’s antirust probe into Apple, a series of Amazon advertisements prompted Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller to block in-app purchases of Kindle books on iOS. 9to5Mac reports: As it stands today, the Kindle app for iPhone and iPad does not allow users to purchase…
Amazon Stops Selling ‘Active Content’ Games in Kindle Reader’s Store
Once upon a time, you could play Scrabble on your black-and-white Kindle readers. Or chess or sudoko, or even solve New York Times Crossword Puzzles. Amazon’s Kindle Store had included 500 slick Java-based “Active Content” downloads… Electronic Arts even produced Kindle-specific versions of Monopoly, Yahtzee, and Battleship, while Amazon created original games with titles like Every Word and Pirate Stash —…
O’Reilly Makes ‘Prototype to Product’ eBook Free to Help COVID-19 Innovators
Alan Cohen is a software and systems engineer/manager, and a lifelong technophile who’s been engaged in developing medical devices and other high-reliability products. So right now he’s working with the new Massachusetts-based “Mass General Brigham Center for COVID Innovation” to refine an emergency ventilator prototype — and then mass-produce thousands of them. “Most of what’s needed is the expertise to turn…
Coming Soon: an Open Source eBook Reader
Electronic component distributor Digi-Key will be producing a small manufacturing run of the “open hardware” ereader from the Open Book Project, reports Gizmodo: The raw hardware isn’t as sleek or pretty as devices like the Kindle, but at the same time there’s a certain appeal to the exposed circuit board which features brief descriptions of various components, ports, and connections etched…
Audible Settles Copyright Lawsuit With Publishers Over Audiobook Captions
After months of back and forth, Audible has settled in a copyright lawsuit with major publishers over its plan to introduce captions to their recordings, a proposal that the publishing houses argued was simply reading. The Guardian reports: In July, the audiobook company owned by Amazon announced Captions, an additional function for the existing app that would allow customers to read…
How Apple — and Millennials — Stopped the Rise of eBooks
As this decade winds to a close, Vox looks back 10 years to when ebooks “appeared poised to disrupt the publishing industry on a fundamental level.”
Analysts confidently predicted that millennials would embrace ebooks with open arms and abandon print books, that ebook sales would keep rising to take up more and more market share, that the price of ebooks would continue…