Year: 2018

969 posts

Amazon has discounted hundreds of ebooks this weekend

The Amazon Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals are still ongoing and there are dozens of e-readers and tablets on sale. In order to populate your device full of digital content, Amazon has discounted hundreds of Kindle books.  Each of these titles are written by indie authors and some bestselling ones, the prices range from $1.00 to $3.00. Amazon is also running a huge weekend deal that just populated by bestselling authors such as Michael Connelly, George R.R. Martin,  J.A. Jance, and Neal Stephenson. Open Road has also put all of their ebooks on sale and can be purchased not only from Amazon, but also B&N and Kobo.

E Ink is expanding their manufacturing capabilities

The e-Reader industry has enjoyed a tremendous resurgence in the past twelve months and many companies are seeing success with their ebook readers. There were more e-readers released this year, than any other year. E Ink has disclosed that they are getting so many orders that they plan on expanding their manufacturing capabilities next year, to keep up with demand. President Johnson Lee said their current capacity is now fully booked and their plant in Linkou, northern Taiwan, will not be sufficient to satisfy demand. As a result, the company is considering using part of the capacity at its plant in the US for production in 2019 in addition to the current focus on manufacturing e-book reader applications, Lee added.

Pocketbook releases massive new update for the Inkpad 3

The Pocketbook Inkpad 3 is one of the best e-readers the company has ever made and the large 7.8 inch screen is really solid for ebooks. We reviewed this model earlier this year and were really impressed on the industrial design. Pocketbook has just pushed out a massive new firmware update that adds a bunch of new functionality, such as new audiobook player and revised internet browser.

Read & Play: Why Reading Will Improve Your Poker Game

We all know that poker requires skill, but just how exactly are…

Image Comics is no longer offering DRM-Free Editions

Image Comics was an early adopter of offering most of their comics without any digital rights management. Since 2013 they allowed users to shop directly on their website and download comics to their computer and easily load them on their smartphone, tablet or e-reader. A few weeks ago the comics publisher decided to no longer offer DRM-Free comics on their website and gave users until February 3rd, 2019 to back them up. The news came from an email sent to customers from the Walking Dead and Monstress publisher. It states, “This is an email alert to inform you that ImageComics.com is discontinuing the sale of DRM-free titles through our site. Beginning on November 5th, 2018, DRM-free versions of our books will no longer be available for purchase and all sales of DRM-free versions through ImageComics.com will be discontinued.”

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Xiaomi might be developing an e-reader

Xiaomi developed a prototype e-reader last year and it was shelved as the company started to focus on smart home accessories. It looks like they might be doing something e-reader related sometime in 2019, as they are trying to work out publishing deals, so they can sell ebooks right on the device. Many executives a Xiaomi have responded recently on various forums and Twitter threads, verifying that they have plans for an e-reader. In the past few years the company has strengthened their sales and marketing teams all over the world and they have a recognizable brand.

Amazon accidently leaks customer names and email addresses

Amazon has emailed thousands of users to tell them their username and email address was leaked on their website. When contacted for comment, Amazon said that neither its website nor any of its systems had been breached and that it has “fixed the issue and informed customers who may have been impacted.” It did not reveal the number of accounts affected or which countries the users are located i

Wiley will be creating hundreds of new audiobooks

Wiley specializes in academic and business related ebooks. The company currently has over 2,000 audiobooks that are primarily sold through Audible, although other retailers only account for a small percentage of sales. Wiley has just ironed out a distribution deal with RBMedia and will be creating 650 audiobooks over the next three years. In this agreement, RBmedia will serve as the audio publisher and Wiley will be providing the narration. The audiobooks will be available for libraries and sold via audiobooks.com

Good e-Reader is now available on Amazon Alexa

Good e-Reader is now available as a Flash Briefing on Amazon Alexa. This includes the Alexa app for Android and iOS, in addition to the Echo line of smart speakers. Alexa will read all of the latest headlines and the news articles, which is ideal if you prefer the audio editions of our stories.

Barnes and Noble Plans to Open 15 New Stores in 2019

Barnes and Noble plans on opening up to 15 new stores in…

Amazon Alexa to get a special Newscaster Voice

Amazon is developing a customized Alexa Voice to read the news. Currently Alexa reads the news, but uses the same voice when you issue it commands or search results. Amazon has created a special version of the voice that sounds the same as a quintessential evening newscaster. Everyone is familiar with the “newscaster” voice style; it has a unique flow and emphasis atypical in ordinary conversations. The newscaster voice makes it immediately clear that the user is hearing a news report while helping emphasize key points, break up the information, and state everything clearly. Amazon says the new speaking style is enabled by by the company’s development of “neural text-to-speech” technology or NTTS. This is the next generation of speech synthesis, that use machine learning to generate expressive voices more quickly. Currently, Alexa uses uses concatenative speech synthesis, a method that’s been around for decades. This involves breaking up speech samples into distinct sounds (known as phonemes) and then stitching them back together to form new words and sentences.

Black Friday Deals for e-readers – Roundup – Updated Constantly

This Black Friday there are many deals and discounts for e-readers. Good e-Reader is running a promotion where every single device we sell will be discounted by at least $20 or more! Amazon, B&N, Onyx, Remarkable, Sony and a number of other vendors are doing their own promotions.

Book sales decreased by 3% at Barnes and Noble

Barnes and Noble has disclosed that this summer they saw a decline in book sales by 3%.  The bookseller saw an increase in sales from adult hardcovers and saw a modest improvement on trade paper, kids, and young adult categories. Non-books increased 1.9%, led by toys and games growth, cafe and better gift results. Overall, B&N  consolidated sales decreased $20 million or 2.5% to $771 million.

KDP Launches New Reports Dashboard in Beta

Self-published authors whose works are distributed via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform may have noticed a couple of beauty-wise changes to their author dashboards. A new report dashboard, currently in beta, gives the muddled old dashboard a much-needed facelift.

Hoopla launches a Book Club for Libraries

Hoopla is one of the largest companies operating in the digital library sector and their claim to fame was the per circulation transaction system, where libraries would get their entire catalog of audiobooks, ebooks, video and other digital content and libraries only pay when a user checked something out. It was designed to make collection managers lives easier, then picking and choosing on a per title basis. Lately, Hoopla has been losing market share to Overdrive and the Cloud Library, and in order to stem the bleeding, they have just launched a book club.

Kobo Forma 32GB now available on the Kobo website

Kobo released the Forma e-reader last month and the only model available was the 8GB edition. The 32GB version was only available in Japan, but that has changed. Kobo is now selling both models directly on their website for customers in Canada and the United States. You can choose what storage option you want during the checkout process.

Our favourite bingo themed ebooks

Bingo might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it certainly is…

Michelle Obama’s Becoming is B&N Fastest Selling Book of the Year

Barnes and Noble has announced that Michelle Obama’s Becoming had the biggest first-week sales of any book this year, surpassing Fear for the most copies sold, as well as having the best first-week start of any adult book in over three years. This comes at the time of the year where the bookseller desperately needs more revenue during the holiday season, last year sales declined by 6.4%.

Scribd Audiobooks now available via Waze Audio Player

Waze is a GPS navigation system for your automobile and for the past while they have been beta testing an Audio Player that has  Pandora, Deezer, iHeartRadio, NPR One, Scribd, Spotify, Stitcher, and TuneIn functionality. The system is now rolling out everywhere and you can control your audio app of choice in Waze and vice versa — you can even toggle between apps. So you can get lost in the music (or podcasts or audiobooks or radio or news) and not on the road.

This is how you get Google Play working on Android e-readers

Earlier this year Google cracked down on devices that were not certified and blacklisted them from accessing the Google Play Store and various core services. It is now possible to bypass this and get Play working on e-readers.

Onyx Boox Poke PRO Unboxing

Onyx Boox has just released the Poke PRO and it costs a…

Kindle for PC Updated to Version 1.25

Kindle for PC is a program that allows you to shop for ebooks and read them on your computer, slate or tablet. Whenever you purchase something everything is stored in the Amazon Cloud and can be accessed on Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets or any of the companies apps. Amazon has just purchased out version 1.25 for both PC and MAC.