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How to read best sellers before they’re complete and published? Just imagine, let’s say George Martin, the author of “Game of Thrones,” releases his new novel not in full, but publishes it chapter by chapter. Readers engage in discussions of plot twists and character developments expressing their ideas on how the story should proceed. Martin takes some of those suggestions on board and surprises his readers with the very plot twist they’ve been longing for. “Impossible!”, you’re thinking. And you’re wrong. This has become possible with the launch of the English version of Litnet an innovative literary platform that has been successfully operating on the global market since 2015.

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.

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.”

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 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.

n every corner of the art world, there are salacious tales of petty arguments, long-held feuds, squabbles and fiascos. Whether it’s actors who vow never to work together again or singers with a spotlight-sized axe to grind, it not only doesn’t surprise the public anymore, it actually makes for good media fodder. Perhaps for too long, we’ve thought authors could be better than that. After all, these aren’t some industry-made, navel-baring pop star hurling Twitter insults at her competing clone. Authors are educated, worldly, and carry the weight of literary prestige with them…right? Not so much, as it turns out. Two headline-grabbing events have occurred in the publishing world within days of each other, and they clearly demonstrate that Authors Behaving Badly isn’t limited to any single genre or publishing avenue.

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.

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.”

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 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 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.

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.

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!

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

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

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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