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The founder of the Waterstones book chain in the United Kingdom is setting up a subscription service for digital books. Read Petite will allow customers to read short stories and serializations, with an unlimited number of novellas readable for a monthly fee, effectively becoming the equivalent of Spotify but for ebooks and magazines.
Kobo will partner with major Brazilian bookseller Livraria Cultura to sell its e-readers and ebooks. The e-reader manufacturer confirmed the partnership in a blog post last Friday. The deal will give Kobo a foothold in the burgeoning Brazilian e-reader market, which has seen increased attention from the major digital reader and e-book retailers over the past year.
Amazon Publishing's New York arm has signed a deal with media vendor Ingram to distribute its ebooks through other sales venues. CoreSource, Ingram's digital distribution channel, will distribute the ebook rights to Barnes and Noble, Apple, and Kobo. Although e-books are "supplied" by Ingram, the choice remains with the vendor if it chooses to supply Amazon-published e-books.
Technology company 3M and the St. Paul, Minnesota library held an open house today, demonstrating the new 3M cloud-based library e-book lending service. The 3M Cloud Library offers a turnkey system, complete with pre-loaded and licensed digital content, in-library hardware, and access to apps for borrowing and reading. The complete system was made available to patrons for the first time at today's open house.
After inspiring the Kobo eReader and originally geared toward the iPad, Kobo has now brought its eReading app up to iOS 4 compatibility. The app, which opens up access to numerous eBooks in the Kobo library uses Kobo-optimized formatting, offers alternate appearances for bookmarks and an 'I'm Reading' feature for quickly switching between active books. It can sync across multiple platforms.
ZappTek has launched a new application, Legend Maker 1.0 for Mac OS X, which converts book manuscripts from word processor files to eBooks. The new software generates eBooks files that will work with the iPad, Kindle, Reader and Nook and also software readers ibis reader and bookworm. It can generate eBooks with complex layout and design, using images, indexes, tables of contents and footnotes and endnotes.
Custom Solutions has introduced a new e-book utility, eBook Reader. The software can download free e-books and save them to a bookshelf folder kept in a user's Documents folder. While eBook Reader allows users to read the books directly from the software interface, it also provides an option to automatically convert text to speech. The reader can be expanded to fill the screen and supports fonts between 10-24 point sizes. It also bookmarks each location where the reader stops between sessions.
In brief: TidBITS publishing has released two new e-books, authored by Joe Kissell, which provide tips on maintaining and fixing Mac computers. The e-books can help Mac users achieve peak performance from their computers and are available for $10 each of $16 as a bundle. CourseForum Technologies has announced a new two-for-one promotion on all of its license sales. Any customer who purchases licenses for one of its products before June 30th will instantly receive double the order for free. Meanwhile, new details on the upcoming iPhone game Circuit Strike.One have been released. The game takes place inside a computer network where players are trying to hack all of the nodes in a network.
In brief: LaCie has formed a strategic partnership with an online storage provider, while The X Lab has announced a new troubleshooting book and Parallels has opened preregistration to next year's summit. Caleido AG, creators of the online storage solution Wuala have announced that it has merged with LaCie, a manufacturer of external storage devices. Dominik Grolimund, co-founder and CEO of Caledio AG is excited about the new partnership and believes that together the two companies will be able to "build a reliable and secure cloud storage by integrating millions of devices around the world." LaCie believes the collaboration will allow the company to transform into a comprehensive digital storage provider. Philippe Spruch, LaCie's CEO, is looking forward to providing customers with new storage methods.
Lexcycle has announced an agreement with Adobe that will add protected-content eBook support to its Stanza app for the iPhone. The agreement expands Stanza support into a large variety of commercially published eBooks from major publishers. As part of the the partnership, Stanza will be compatible with PDF and EPUB rendering technologies from Adobe along with the eBook content protection technology.
