Michael Kozlowski

11738 posts
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Barnes and Noble offers tons of books for 50% off

In order to drive traffic to their 600 bookstores and generate meaningful revenue for the holiday season B&N has just announced that over 100 books, including some of the year’s hottest gift books and new releases, will be 50% off starting today, through Monday, December 24th.

Ebook sales increased for the second time in two years

Digital book sales increased for the second time in two years in October 2018. Publishers saw modest revenue growth in eBooks (4.4%), with increases for the format across all trade book categories. Aside from downloaded audio, eBooks had the largest percent of revenue growth for the month, compared to October 2017. eBook revenue increased in October for Adult Books (3.0%), Childrens/YA Books (17.3%), and Religious Presses (12.0%). However, for the year-to-date (Jan. – Oct.), eBook revenues were down 3.1% from the same period in 2017. Downloaded audio remains the format with the highest percent revenue growth year-to-date (37.7%).

Is Bookeen in trouble?

Bookeen has been making e-readers since 2003 and has a long and storied history of developing unique products. In the past few months the company seems to be in trouble. Audrey Keszek has been responsible for Bookeens social media accounts since 2010 and recently left the company in August. A successor was hired, but so far he does not done any work. All of the products on the Bookeen online store are unavailable and the company has stated that they were victims of their own success and everything is out of stock. They recommend everyone buy things from other online companies such as Le Clerc.

Best Books of 2018 Roundup – Constantly Updated

Everyone involved in journalism are doing their annual best books of the year lists.  Good e-Reader has decided that instead of doing a megapost, where every single news source will be featured and hopefully aid in book discovery. This post will be constantly updated as new lists come out, if we are missing your favorite website or online publication, please drop a comment and let us know.

Amazon UK experimenting with ebook gifting system

The Amazon UK website has quietly been testing an ebook gifting system. This will allow users to purchase an ebook and gift to another person, as long as you have their email address. There are further options to establish a date in which the email will be sent and a little room for a custom message. The ebook gifting system has only been available in the US, since it launched in 2010. I have heard the new system will go live on Friday.

Amazon Kindle for Android allows you to store ebooks on the SD card

The Amazon Kindle app for Android now allows users to store content on the SD card. This is useful if you have an extensive collection of large files, such as PDF files, cookbooks, comics or magazines. Once you have the new version of the app, simply go the settings menu and grant Kindle permission to write to your SD card and Kindle will prompt you to move all of the digital content over.

Remarkable unveils new accessories

Remarkable has just released a series of new carrying cases for their writing tablet. The first is a durable wool felt sleeve available in Rose Burgundy and Petrol Blue and retails for $99 If you feel like you need to dress up your device with a timeless and fashionable look that ages beautifully, you might be interested in the premium leather case that is available in Maple Brown and Graphite Black for $129. They also have polymer weave covers in Charcoal Grey and Coral Red and they are retailing for $79.99.

Good e-Reader is now an authorized dealer for Pocketbook

Pocketbook e-readers are now available from the Good e-Reader Store. People who live in Canada, United States or customers from all over the world can now purchase a myriad of e-readers.  The models the store currently has stocked is the Pocketbook Aqua 2, Pocketbook Touch HD 2, Pocketbook Touch Lux 4, Pocketbook Basic Lux 2 and the InkPad 3. Pocketbook has been developing e-readers since 2009 and their primarily market was Europe and Asia. They had no retail presence in North America, but this has all changed due to Good e-Reader becoming the sole distributor for these two markets. New orders will shipped out within 48 hours and tracking numbers will be provided.

Project Fiona – The Tale of the very first Kindle e-Reader

The Amazon Kindle is ubiquitous with the e-reader and enjoys tremendous brand name recognition. It has sold the most units worldwide over the past ten years than any other company and continues to dominate digital books in Canada, UK and the US. Initially the first Kindle was called project Fiona and it borrowed its design sensibilities from the Blackberry, which was mandated by CEO Jeff Bezos. This is the tale of how the very first Kindle got developed and what made it into the juggernaut that is today. November 19 2007 was the day Jeff Bezos walked on stage at the W Hotel in Manhattan and unveiled the Kindle. There were around 100 journalists in attendance, a far cry from the media circuses that surrounded Apple products.  Bezos stated that Amazon’s new device was the successor to the five-hundred-and-fifty-year-old invention of blacksmith Johannes Gutenberg, the movable-type printing press. “Why are books the last bastion of analog?” Bezos asked that day. “The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and as well suited to its task as the book, and if so, how?” “Instead of shopping on your PC, you shop on the device. The content is delivered seamlessly to the device. Normally you would do Wi-Fi. but you have to find a hotspot. We did not like this technology. decided to use EVDO. As soon as I tell you we are using EVDO that should cause a second set of concerns, because everybody knows there has to be a data plan and a monthly bill. We didn’t like that either. So we built Amazon WhisperNet. it is built on top of Sprint’s EVDO network, but we insulate you from all of those things. there is no data plan, no multi-year contract, no monthly bill. We take care of all that in the background, so you can just read.”

Major Publications are doubling down on book coverage

Since the beginning of 2017, The New York Times has continued to expand its already robust book coverage. More recently, New York announced that it would triple its book coverage. In October, The Atlantic launched a Books section and a newsletter, “The Books Briefing,” with plans for “additional products.” Even BuzzFeed is getting in on the action: in November, they launched an online book club, complete with an attendant Facebook group and newsletter. Amazon Charts launched last year in the United States and it is a new bestseller list that gives users a top 20 list of of the most read and most sold books on Amazon. You can get a sense on what is a true bestseller for not only books, but audiobooks and ebooks too. Basically it accurately reflects how readers are really reading and buying books and even pulls data from popular books on Kindle Unlimited. The New York Media organization has also expanded on their books coverage. It’s named Boris Kachka as its books editor, and he’ll be in charge of tripling book coverage across New York Media properties — the print magazine, Vulture, The Cut, Daily Intelligencer, The Strategist, and Grub Street.  Vulture will also have more coverage of audiobooks, genre (like YA and horror), and new releases; it already runs a real-life monthly book club at The Strand. The Cut will run more book excerpts and author profiles, as well as a series called “Yesterday’s Women,” in which essayists will write about overlooked women writers. Daily Intelligencer runs weekly Q&As with authors of important nonfiction books. The Strategist has developed best-of lists and also links to existing ones, and Grub Street will publish new cookbook roundups and excerpts from chef and restaurant memoirs.

Barnes and Noble releases Nook Tablet 7 2018 Edition

Barnes and Noble released the Nook Tablet 7 last year and it is considered a very budget device. It primarily completed against the Amazon Fire 7 and appealed to people invested in the B&N ecosystem. Today the nation’s largest bookseller announced a second generation NOOK 7 tablet with expanded storage to carry your virtual library, and an updated reading experience just in time for holiday shopping. It is available today in stores and online for $49.99.

These are the top audiobooks and ebooks of the year from Google Play

Google Play is a recent entrant in the audiobook space, they only got involved in it earlier this year. They have been selling ebooks a lot longer than that and are one of the more entrenched players in the industry, primarily due to the bookstore being pre-loaded on millions of Android devices. If do business with Google, the company has just released some sales data that looks at the highest grossing audiobooks and ebooks on their platform for all of 2018.

Best of Prime 2018: Prime Reading

They say the book is always better than the movie, but what about the comic book? Members tested that theory out with “Black Panther,” Prime Reading’s most beloved comic-to-movie adaptation. Members love mysteries – half of Prime Reading’s top ten most read books this year were Mystery novels, including “Say You’re Sorry,” the most read book of the year. The top five most borrowed titles by Prime members in the U.S. include “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Milk and Honey” and “Say You’re Sorry.” Members explored loss and survival with “Milk and Honey” and are continuing their journey with the poet’s second book, “The Sun and Her Flowers.”

The Tale of Rocketbook – The very first e-reader

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning created the very first e-reader in 1997, the Rocketbook. They were lifelong voracious readers and saw a future where everyone was reading digital books. A prototype was quickly developed and pitched to Jeff Bezos at Amazon, but they took a pass because the device needed to be plugged into a computer to download books. A few days later they took a meeting with Barnes and Noble and a deal was closed within a week, the bookseller owned 50% of the company. In the first year, 20,000 Rocketbook e-readers were sold. A few years later the e-reader was discontinued, this is the story of the first e-reader. In 1997 the tech world was a very different place. The Palm Pilot reigned supreme and Blackberry hadn’t even released a phone yet. People had been reading PDF files and various other kinds of ebooks on their computers for years, but there was no handheld ebook reader on the market. This prompted Eberhard and Tarpenning to form a new company called NuvoMedia and try and get some investment capital to make something happen. Since even E-Ink wasn’t around yet, they had to use transflective LCD screen. The device weighed a little over a pound, heavy by today’s standards, but it could be held with one hand, like a paperback book, and its battery lasted twenty hours with the backlight on, which compares favorably to today’s mobile devices. In the book by Brad Stone, the Everything Store, he talks about the following “In late 1997, the NuvoMedia founders and their lawyer took a Rocketbook prototype to Seattle and spent three weeks in negotiations with Bezos and his top executives. Bezos “was really intrigued by our device,” Eberhard says. “He understood that the display technology was finally good enough.”

Onyx Boox 2.0 Firmware Update is now available

Onyx Boox has just released their firmware 2.0 update for all modern e-readers. This includes a vastly improved UI and hundreds of fixes to enhance user experience. It can be downloaded as an over the air update with WIFI turned on and it is also available as a manual download from the Onyx website. Not only is the UI improved but there now an online bookstore, 30% speed increase of opening PDF files, better two-page spread management, handwriting search & edit, bluetooth keyboard input on notes, app management & optimization. There has also been some new features for using the stylus such as select, move, rotate, duplicate, resize, and remove handwritten notes and drawings. They also added a new recognition feature that lets you run searches through your handwritten notes.

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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