[This article was originally published in the March 2012 issue of News on Bookselling, the magazine of the Australian Booksellers Association.] This year will mark the fifth anniversary of Amazon’s launch of the Kindle, the event that triggered the spectacular rise of the ebook. Amazon has remained the biggest beneficiary of this growth, with its [...]

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Australian readers will have few reasons not to join the ebook revolution this Christmas as a host of offerings come on stream. The past year has seen major strides in the key areas of local availability, price, ease of use and ease of purchase. “This Christmas will be a very important one for ebooks in [...]

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Amazon’s loving its Kindle owners. The retail giant is letting Kindle owners who sign up for its US$79 Prime service borrow an ebook each month for no extra fee. Prime is a premium service for Amazon customers that started as an offer of unlimited shipping for a one-time annual payment. That US$79 fee now includes [...]

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A couple of weeks ago, the publishing industry’s EPUB3 specification was finally signed off. This was the cue for device makers and e-reading app developers to build it into their next releases and for publishers to start work on enhanced ebooks. Now Amazon has responded with its own next generation ebook format, Kindle Format 8 (KF8), complicating [...]

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Amazon has announced its long-anticipated entry into the tablet market with the US$199 Kindle Fire, due to go on sale 15 November and US-only for now. While some were anticipating an iPad Killer and several commentators are disappointed that it’s not, taking Apple head-on today was never going to be Amazon’s strategy. Following Apple’s playbook [...]

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