Last week Amazon launched a subscription service called Kindle Unlimited, immediately dubbed the “Netflix for ebooks” by just about everyone. It costs $9.99 per month to subscribe, which works out to be $120 per year. For that reasonable price you get unlimited access to a library of over 600,000 books as well as around 2,000 audiobooks. That […]
Publishing
Are eBooks Bad for Reading and Writers? Leasing vs. Owning and More
This week Wired published a provocative article about ebooks. In the piece, titled “The Abomination of eBooks,” author Art Brodsky points out how the applicable rules for ebooks are fundamentally different than those for print books; in particular ebooks are leased rather than actually bought and owned. Because of this, he argues that it doesn’t make […]
Adventures in Kindle Direct Publishing: New Book “Savvy for the Social Web”
Last week I published a book on Amazon’s Kindle platform. It was a fairly straightforward process, although I had to take some care with the formatting. I wrote my book in Word and was fortunate that I did not have any images or tables. Had that been the case I feel that using HTML would […]
Academic SEO: Why Search Engine Optimization Isn’t Just For Businesses
SEO is often thought of as a purely commercial endeavor: companies and other for-profit websites use keywords strategically, make use of headings and meta tags, and build inbound links in order to increase search engine positions and generate more revenue. But in the world of academia, scholars are also recognizing a need to implement some […]
Kindle eTextbook Rentals and the Future of Textbook Publishing
Amazon’s recent unveiling of a Kindle Textbook Rental Service, which allows students to rent electronic versions of “tens of thousands of textbooks,” is the latest news in the radically changing textbook publishing market. Amazon boasts savings up to 80% of the print cover price, offers very flexible rental periods, and enables students to access their […]
Harper Collins’ 26 Checkout Policy Challenges Traditional Role of the Library
Harper Collins recently released a new library ebook policy in which the licenses to its content expire after 26 uses, forcing libraries to purchase them again. This represents a very dangerous trend affecting the very role of the library, and underscores a need for library and information science professionals to take a stand against competing […]