Month: November 2018

88 posts

Michelle Obama’s Becoming is the Top Best Selling Book of 2018

Michelle Obama’s autobiography Becoming is the number one bestselling book in the world. Which is shocking considering it only came out on November 13th. On the very first day it sold 725,000 copies and 17 days later it has sold a staggering 3.4 million copies in Canada and the United States. This includes audiobook sales, ebooks and large print editions. Sales are brisk in international markets, since the title is available in 31 different languages. The book has been #1 on most bestseller lists throughout the country throughout the past two weeks, including those at the New York Times, USA Today and various online retailers such as Amazon. It is also the #1 adult nonfiction bestseller in, among other territories, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Greece, the publisher said. Penguin Random House added that the book also made the bestseller lists in Australia, Israel, Korea, Taiwan, and South Africa.

E Ink creates JustWrite technology for drawing with no latency

There are plenty of digital note taking devices on the market such as the Sony Digital Paper, Remarkable and the Onyx Boox Note. E Ink has just created some new technology that might revolutionize the way we draw on an e-paper screen. E Ink is calling this new tech JustWrite and it delivers a natural writing experience without the use of a TFT backplane. Exhibiting almost no latency in pen writing, this technology closely resembles writing on paper, natural surfaces or marker boards. The film can be produced via roll to roll manufacturing typical of E Ink’s electronic paper, and requires only a writing stylus and simple electronics to enable functionality. The simplicity of this technology enables any surface, small to large, to be digital writing enabled. The technology is compatible with an optional digitizer, but it could also be used with just a stylus.

Boyue Likebook Mimas Now Available on Good e-Reader

The Boyue Likebook Mimas is now available as a pre-order on the Good e-Reader Store. This product will be released sometime in the next few months, as Boyue is currently developing English firmware. For those of you that wanted a 10.3 inch octa-core e-reader with color temperature system and a WACOM screen, this product might be for you!

Onyx Boox Nova Unboxing and Review

There has been a lot of interest in the new Onyx Boox…

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Amazon Announces New Kindle Oasis 2 Premium Leather Case

Amazon went back to the drawing board a few months ago and…

Will Amazon discount the Paperwhite 4?

The Kindle Paperwhite 4 has only been available for just over a month and it has already received some early promotions. In the past week Amazon launched a six month free subscription to Kindle Unlimited when you bought the PW4, but it has since expired. The Paperwhite 4 also received a slight discount in the United Kingdom, but so far no other country has received a price reduction. Will Amazon put the new Paperwhite on sale from now until Christmas?

Listen to audiobooks? Here are the Top Bestseller Lists and Review Sites

Audiobooks are the fastest growing segment in publishing, but it is hard to find resources. Hardly anyone is reviewing them on a regular basis and it is difficult to know what new titles are coming out or if the narration is any good. In order to assist audiobook lovers, Good e-Reader would like to review our resources list, which keeps tabs on everything new coming out and if they are any good.

The Biggest Scam in Publishing?

The digital publishing revolution is so old that a great many reading consumers might not be able to envision a time when they couldn’t simply pop online to order a book, download a new title from their favorite author, or use an app or PDF for supplemental book material. eBooks and digital publishing have simply become a part of everyday life for many people. But there’s one branch of the publishing family tree that has still not caught up with the times: educational publishing. Nearly every facet of education has been left in the dust when it comes to access, price, and readily available updates to texts. When this digital publishing took off in a major way, educational publishers were supposedly going to insert e-textbooks into every classroom from preschool through grad school. What’s the holdup? There are a lot of factors stopping the widespread switch to files instead of paper, but that’s only one factor in educational publishing. The other is the way new concepts are discovered, researched, and published to begin with. Scientific research is carefully horded by academic publishers, keeping anyone without deep pockets from accessing the findings. What’s even more concerning is that many research projects are funded by the taxpayers before going straight to the publisher’s paywall.

Where Would We Be Without Amazon? Buying Books on Smashwords

There’s little doubt that Amazon has changed everything about publishing. It’s not just a matter of opening the doors for indie authors, producing a viable e-reader device and then creating a platform for content to fill it, or leveraging the power of enhanced searchability to give authors potential visibility. Amazon has even sparked change in traditional publishing, such as prompting some companies to rethink the ridiculous wait times for royalty payments and upping the percentage of royalty share that authors traditionally received. But Amazon has also led to the death of a number of companies who simply couldn’t keep up. Smaller presses, literary agents, and countless brick-and-mortar bookstores are gone, unable to stay afloat in a world where one-click book buying, free two-day shipping, and 70% author royalties are considered normal. But what do we do when Amazon is no longer there? It’s not that far-fetched a possibility, as author David Gaughran’s recent post about books disappearing from international consumers’ sales shelves highlighted. At any given time, every author who sells exclusively on Amazon via the KDP platform could wake up to find their livelihood and fan following are gone. Luckily, Amazon isn’t the only game in town, despite the pop culture belief that it is. B&N is still stubbornly hanging on, Kobo is reaching more international markets than some major-name retailers, and Smashwords just released the news that there are now half a million titles available on its platform. As a company, Smashwords and its founder have been an interesting site to watch. At the risk of insulting a business model that has existed in the wings for ten years now, it’s the Little Engine That Could of ebook self-publishing. Founder and CEO Mark Coker has sat for interviews with this site several times, but the quiet bookish demeanor is not to be dismissed. Coker has long been an outspoken critic of book sellers who are too big for their britches and shutting out all other competitors for this exact reason: what will happen to books when (not if) Amazon fails? Fortunately, just because a household name is well-known, that doesn’t mean it’s the only option after all. Readers and authors alike would do well to explore their options on other platforms and keep the books coming in.

Amazon Claims to Resolve “Disappearing” eBooks Issue

A couple of weeks ago, prolific author, advocate, and self-pub expert David Gaughran published a blog piece on a disturbing phenomenon: international customers were having trouble buying titles that had been published via KDP. The post had over 100 comments in the first twenty-four hours, largely from authors who detailed their own problems with trying to sell their books on Amazon and its international markets. Comments over on Passive Voice were largely the same, with authors outlining their struggles with the bookselling platform in general, not just in terms of sales frustrations. According to Gaughran, “A situation blew up at Amazon over the weekend which has made most KDP ebooks unavailable to purchase for international readers who use the US Kindle Store — one which has also exposed a glaring security problem. This issue — which is either a bug or a badly bungled roll-out — is causing great confusion as its effects are only visible to those outside the USA, which might explain why Amazon has been so slow to address it, or even understand the problem, it seems.” But there’s more to the story. As Gaughran points out, the issue was a slow-moving one, affecting customers first in Australia a few weeks before this larger-scale incident. That hardly speaks to a server issue or a software bug, although stranger things have been known to happen. However, the gradual problems sound more like policy changes gone wrong or an attempt to unveil an alternative to buying books via the US-based Amazon platform.

Onyx Boox Poke Unboxing and Review

The Onyx Boox Poke is the first six inch e-reader that has…

The best ebook and e-reader Cyber Monday Deals

Cyber Monday puts a heavy emphasis on digital content to populate your new e-reader. There are dozens of retailers that are offering discounts on ebooks, but there are still a few hardware deals around. During the next 48 hours, this post will be constantly updated once more companies announce their plans for Cyber Monday. If you hear about a new deal we have not published yet, drop a comment below. Amazon The Kindle Paperwhite 3 is on sale. The regular price is $139 and the deal price is $79 without Special Offers. The Kindle Paperwhite 3 Essential Bundle comes with a case and a charger. The regular price is $179, and it is on sale for $119. Best Buy is also selling the Kindles at the same price as Amazon, so you can buy one at the store or on their website, available in both black and white. In Canada, the Paperwhite 3 is retailing for $99, which is $40 off the regular price. The Kindle Oasis 2 is on sale for the first time, only in Canada. The regular price is $389 and the sale price is $329, which is $60 off, this is a good deal. Amazon is running a series of Kindle book sales in the States. You can get over 350 titles that are 80% off. They are also running a sale on a couple hundred of indie books that range from $1 to $3. There are just over 2,000 books in Kindle Countdown deals. They are offered directly by the authors. The countdown mechanism is that the price of the book goes up gradually. At the beginning it’s usually $0.99, after a couple of days it’s raised to $1.99, and so on. If Kindle Unlimited is something you want to try, there is no time like the present. You can save 96% on three months of Kindle Unlimited – the deal is active through November 30, 2018. You can get the 3-month subscription for $0.99 instead of $29.97. It means you save as much as 96%. Existing Kindle Unlimited subscribers are not eligible to take part in the promotion,

Over a third Black Friday purchases were made on the phone

Black Friday was all over various news channels the past couple of days and Adobe has reported that 33.5% of online Black Friday sales were completed on smartphones , last year only 29.1% of purchases were made on one. Black Friday pulled in $6.22 billion in online sales, up 23.6% from a year ago and setting a new high. Adobe tracks transactions for 80 of the top 100 internet retailers in the U.S. like Walmart and Amazon. So these figures are the best we are going to get. While it’s not clear exactly what prompted the uptick in phone-based shopping sprees, Adobe’s Taylor Schreiner credited it in part to stores crafting “better mobile experiences.” We’d add that the phones themselves might provide more enjoyable shopping through larger screens — it doesn’t feel quite so much like you’re shopping through a porthole. Whether you thrive on Black Friday or just see it as consumerism run amok, the data suggests that a growing number of people are comfortable leaving their PCs behind when they make big-ticket purchases.