New Zealand Booksellers chair Hamish Wright has taken a shot at Random House Australia for selling Dan Brown’s new book The Lost Symbol directly from its website to Australian and New Zealand buyers. It’s a friendly shot, with a barb, as you’ll see from the full press release below. But, certainly as far as New [...]

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Google Books’ Engineering Director Dan Clancy gave a hint at the future Google sees for the digital book. On Clancy’s list: Books will be stored “in the cloud”, that is, they will reside on the internet rather than being a file sitting on your computer or mobile device. Google would like its own servers to [...]

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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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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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The NZ$100 million upgrade to New Zealand’s National Library building has prompted debate about whether it’s money well spent. The latest contribution to this debate from the New Zealand Herald’s Brian Rudman suggests that the money would be better spent digitising the library’s collection so it’s available to everyone, not just tourists and residents of [...]

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