By Hannah Johnson Another day, another Tech Digest: Games Come to the Kindle One of the arguments against electronic reading is that the potential for distraction is high. Well brace yourselves for more distraction. Amazon has released two word games for the Kindle — Shuffled Row and Every Word — for the Kindle DX and Kindle 2. The games were …
Hong Kong is Eager to Follow the Fashion of Mobile Reading
By Wuping Zhao Reading e-books on Kindle-like e-readers is out of fashion, according to various reports from the 21st Hong Kong Book Fair which was held from 21st to 27th July, 2010. Mobile is the new e-reading platform of choice. Like the Paris Salon du Livre, the annual Hong Kong Book Fair is mainly for the local public to buy …
Why Cell Phones Will Dominate the E-Book Market in China
• In 2009, China ran up $1bn in sales of digital content, and the market is growing at an estimated 40% annually. In response China Publishing Group (CPG) -– China’s largest state-sponsored publishing conglomerate — has launched Digital Media Co. Ltd., a new digital media and technology subsidiary. • From August 24-27, the German Book Office Beijing is hosting a trip …
Teenage Thumb Tribes: Why Cell Phone Novels are Part of Publishing’s Future
This article appeared in our print edition for BookExpo America 2010. You can read the original here. By Jacob Lewis When I was seventeen, after reading Portnoy’s Complaint, I send an adoring note to Philip Roth. It was a revelatory book for me, and I wanted to tell him how drawn I was to it. He never responded. I met …
Do Comic Book Apps Risk Being Bad Animation?
By Edward Nawotka In our lead article we look at a conversation at the London Book Fair about the future of comic books in the digital age. As more and more publishers translate comics into apps, the question of how to re-imagine the format becomes all the more important. Without new thinking, do comic book apps risk resembling little more …
Digitizing Double Page Explosions: London Looks at Comics as E-books
By Liz Bury LONDON: The Comics & Graphic Novels Pavilion, complete with Comics Café, made its debut at the the London Book Fair this year. The category has enjoyed an upswing in the UK in recent years, as products from the US and Japanese manga has tapped a growing market, and the new forum generated some of the biggest buzz …
Textunes Sold 50,000 E-books in Germany in 09
By Siobhan O’Leary As in the US, there has been a disappointingly paltry revelation of hard figures in Germany when it comes to e-book sales. However, Berlin-based startup textunes, which teams with publishers to make e-books available for use on mobile devices (particularly the iPhone and iPod Touch), has just announced that it sold 50,000 e-books in the last twelve …
Team Europe Ventures Promises €6 million for Mobile Start-ups
By Siobhan O’Leary Berlin-based investment firm Team Europe Ventures has announced a new initiative to provide funding to promising Internet and mobile Internet startups over the next three years. The €6 million fund will be split among four to five startups each year (approx. €500,000 each), which will be hand-selected by Team Europe Ventures and a team of partners. The …
Why is Spain So Slow to Launch E-books?
By Edward Nawotka Today’s lead story looks at how Spanish publishers Maeva and Random House Mondadori are approaching the mobile and e-book markets in Spain. While both are making progress in the mobile market, the e-book segment appears stalled in beta. The market for Spanish-language e-books has potential to be huge, as it encompasses both Spain and all of Mexico, Central …
Digital Case Study: The Mobile and E-book Market in Spain
By Emily Williams This is a continuation of our Digital Case Study of Spain. Yesterday we covered publishers’ online marketing strategies. You can read that article here. Spanish-language publishers have taken their time moving into the e-book market, but that is finally changing. Using two companies as examples — small independent publisher Maevea and Random House Mondadori — we take a …