Amazon is giving away a dozen free ebooks for World Book Day. These titles are from AmazonCrosssing, which is an imprint devoted towards that are translated into English from other languages. The first translated books were the French-language novel The King of Kahel and the German-language novel The Hangman's Daughter … [Read more...]
Google Launches Talk to Books
Google has just launched a new service called Talk to Books and it leverages machine learning. If you type in a full sentence it searches all the sentences in over 100,000 books to find the ones that respond to your input based on semantic meaning. Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering and Rachel Bernstein, Product … [Read more...]
New Book by J.R.R. Tolkien is called the The Fall of Gondolin
The Fall of Gondolin is a new book by J.R.R. Tolkien and was edited and revised by his son Christopher. It was illustrated by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings artist Alan Lee and will be published by HarperCollins this August. Here is the books byline "During the years that the dark lord Morgoth (Sauron’s … [Read more...]
Good e-Reader Launches Audio Reader for Android
Good e-Reader would like to introduce our first major Android app for smartphones and tablets. It is called Audio Reader and it turns any ebook into an audiobook. It reads aloud all of your sideloaded content using Amazon Polly, which is what Alexa is built on. We support 28 different languages and 12 different voices … [Read more...]
Scribd has 750,000 paying subscribers
Scribd is one of the largest unlimited audiobook and ebook websites in the world and they currently have 750,000 paying subscribers. Scribd has seen a double-digit increase in engagement since its shift to an unlimited model in February 2018, and the company’s growth rate has averaged 50% year-over-year. Key indicators … [Read more...]
eBook Piracy is on the rise in 2018
Pirate websites received 300 billion visitors last year and ebooks represent a small, but growing segment. Digimarc and Nielsen conducted a recent study that reveals 41% of all adult e-book pirates are aged between 18 and 29 but perhaps surprisingly, 47% fall into the 30 to 44-year-old bracket. The remaining 13% are … [Read more...]
Microsoft Needs to Develop an e-Reader App
Microsoft has been operating a digital bookstore since late 2017 and they sell ebooks only in the United States and have refused to sell them in other countries. Their store is so feeble that it accounts for less than 1% of all ebook sales. This is primarily attributed to the Edge browser as being the only way you can … [Read more...]
These are the top Google Play Books and Audiobooks for March 2018
Every month Google hypes up the top five audiobooks and ebooks of the month. This gives us an indication on what people are buying on the platform. Google has a paltry 2% market share of the entire US ebook industry and around 4% of the international market. … [Read more...]
The Effect of e-Books on College Students
In the age of the Internet, everything has become accessible. Any information that only two decades ago was under seven locks, today can pop up on anyone’s computer screen. Given that the Internet has presented us with an easy access to any data, books have no longer become something that is hard to find. Besides, … [Read more...]
Indigo Reco has been a Dismal Failure
Indigo Books and Music released a social community and book discovery app in 2016 called Reco for iOS. Reco allows you to develop your own book lists for titles you are currently reading and want to read and then share it via social media. Your lists are not just limited to print either, but you can also include ebooks … [Read more...]
Barnes and Noble Browsery for Android Now Available
Barnes and Noble has been beta testing a new Android app for the past three months and it is called Browsery. It is a gathering place for readers who talk about books with the same passion you do. Rooted in the core elements of the Barnes & Noble store experience – browsing, community, and conversation – Browsery helps … [Read more...]
People Spend more Money on Movies and Music than Books
The popularity of iTunes, Netflix, Spotify and other services are now outpacing book sales for the first time ever. Consumers in the United Kingdom spent a record £7.2bn last year on all forms of music, video and games, from CDs, DVDs and vinyl records. That surpassed the £7.1bn spent on the audiobooks, books, ebooks, … [Read more...]