Attention, fellow muggles; you'll soon be able to get your fill of Harry Potter and his high-flying, Quidditch-playing Hogwarts buddies absolutely free -- at least if you own a Kindle and an Amazon Prime subscription. Today, Amazon announced that all seven of J.K. Rowling's blockbuster books are being added to the company's Kindle Owners' Lending Library as of June 19th.
Print media hasn't fared super well in the face of digital distribution. Turns out, a lot of people prefer live pixels to dead trees. So what's a company like Barnes & Noble -- with serious cash invested in both brick-and-mortar stores and the digital Nook ecosystem -- supposed to do in this new era of reading? The answer, apparently, lies in spinning off the Nook into an entirely new subsidiary company -- and giving Microsoft a 17.6 percent stake in the fresh venture. B&N did just that this morning.
The European Commission has launched a formal investigation and opened antitrust proceedings to determine if Apple and several international publishers colluded to fix prices of eBooks. Publishers named in the investigation include Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Verlagsgrupe Georg von Holzbrinck.
It's hard to believe, but it's been a whole decade since VIA created the Mini-ITX form factor with the launch of its Mini-ITX VT6010. The rest is ongoing history, but what's really cool is how VIA is celebrating the occasion. It's doing so with the launch of its "Small is Beautiful: 10 Years of Mini-ITX" eBook, and while that might seem like a ho-hum read at first, it's not often that we're given an inside glimpse of things straight from the source.
Welcome to the world of digital media, a world where its inhabitants are constantly looking over the shoulder for fear of pickpockets. This fear is prevalent throughout the digital music industry, and apparently eBook publishers are just as skittish. In case we need to be reminded of this, just look at Penguin's recent departure from the OverDrive lending service.
Amazon's HTML5-based Kindle Cloud Reader lets you read your Kindle books in your Web browser, a neat idea that's hampered by lack of widespread support, including Internet Explorer and Firefox. Well, Amazon is still shunning Internet Explorer (or vice versa), but the Kindle Cloud Reader does now work with Mozilla Firefox, along with existing support for Chrome and Safari (on the iPad and desktop).
Amazon just upped the ante in the eBook reader wars by announcing a new benefit for Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership. It's called the "Kindle Owners' Lending Library," which is, well, a lending library for Kindle owners who are currently or plan to become members of Amazon's $79/year Prime service. The online library gives Prime members access to over 5,000 books to borrow for free, including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers.
Amazon has officially cut the ribbon on its library lending program for Kindle. If you live near one of the more than 11,000 participating local libraries and have a library card, you can check out eBooks from your Kindle or Kindle app similar to the way you borrow dead tree equivalents, only you don't need to leave your couch.
While book publishers have been, for the most part, friendly to the idea of e-books – at least since the rise of the Kindle and its ilk – the shift from dead trees to lively pixels still scare many in the industry. Meanwhile, on the TV and movie front, streaming providers like Hulu Plus have been bucking heads with traditional content producers who are fearful of devaluing their content. A new report says Amazon’s looking to take all those anxieties and mix them up in one big worry stew by introducing a Netflix-like subscription e-book service to Amazon Prime accounts.
Following the recent release of the ad-enabled Kindle with a $25 price cut, Amazon today announced yet another potential cost saving feature, Kindle Library Lending. Launching later this year, this feature will allow Kindle customers to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 libraries in the U.S. just as you would do with physical books. The new feature works with all Kindle devices, as well as Kindle reading apps, so even if you're not invested in the hardware, you can still 'check out' an eBook.
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