Amazon’s move to pull copies of George Orwell’s 1984 novel without warning from Kindles has opened it up to attack from civil libertarians and others concerned about the Big Brother implications. But a civil liberties argument is also being used to challenge the hated Digital Rights Management system that underpins the Kindle. And in a [...]

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European regulators are asking publishers for feedback on how they see the proposed Google Books settlement. The move comes soon after the US Justice Department said it was investigating Google for anti-trust concerns. More on the European move here. Twitter It!

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Following its purchase of Fictionwise and its eReader software earlier this year, US bookselling giant Barnes and Noble has launched some early fruits of this acquisition with what it claims is the world’s largest eBookstore. The 700,000 titles in the Barnes and Noble eBookstore (www.bn.com/ebooks) appears to include half a million free ebooks from Google [...]

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I was disappointed by the commentary that greeted this announcement by New Zealand’s National Business Review publisher Barry Colman to start (again) charging for some content. Comment ranged from the reasoned to the vitriolic (see article comments) but fell almost entirely into the “stupid publisher” category. The “stupid publisher” notion has gained wide currency. It [...]

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Spain’s three biggest publishers have joined forces to form a digital distributor with the aim of influencing how the Spanish-language ebook market develops. The three companies — Planeta, Random House Mondadori, and Santillana — collectively control 70% of the Spanish book publishing market and hold worldwide digital rights to most of their Spanish language titles. They’ve launched [...]

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