If you’ve been “lucky” enough to hear one of my presentations recently, you’ll quite likely have heard me plugging Smashwords.com as a great way to dip a toe in the ebook waters with no cost, virtually no pain and very author- and publisher-friendly terms. So it was good to hear this piece of news from [...]

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While commercial publishers work on their project to bring 1000 Great New Zealand ebooks to market, the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) has been quietly working to convert its collection to free downloadable ebooks — 1150 of them available right now. The NZETC is afilliated to Victoria University in Wellington and has been busy digitising [...]

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Sony has raised the ebook reader game a notch with a host of announcements covering new e-reader devices, further support for the open ePub format, and content partnerships. The new hardware announced today was the Sony Reader Daily Edition, a larger format (18 cm/7-inches wide) reader with wireless connectivity that Sony is clearly hoping will [...]

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I was just contacted by someone asking for advice on what she should do regarding the Google Books settlement. I’m no expert but for what it’s worth, here’s what I’ve done and why. I’d welcome comments, corrections or alternative points of view from anyone who might be better informed on some of this stuff that [...]

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Outside the US, there’s been a slow dawning that the very complex, far-reaching Google Book settlement will have important implications for foreign rightsholders too. It will drag many into something they had no say over, driven by parties with no mandate to represent them. In New Zealand, it hasn’t been well-received, particularly by authors following [...]

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