Here’s an interesting piece from blogger Martyn Daniels looking at what we can learn from the Keitai cellphone novel, a uniquely Japanese phenomenon that’s seen many of its bestsellers begin life on mobiles. Among the points he makes: Keitei’s appeal is to younger readers in Japan and has yet to cross the age chasm. These [...]

[Read more →]

Apple’s strategy with its iPod and iTunes store has served as a model for the Kindle and other ebook makers. So this announcement from Apple to drop DRM protection from its entire catalogue of online music marks a significant change and is likely to be watched with interest in the ebook market. The change was [...]

[Read more →]

This post from Tim O’Reilly zeroes in on the big trend that’s about to turn ebook hype (and quite a few other digital opportunities)  into reality. Those of us who’ve been wired for a long time will remember the impact that always-on, high-speed broadband had on the way we used the internet and how much [...]

[Read more →]

Google has announced that it is now indexing pages that are stored as scanned images rather than text. For many older books, whose electronic format might simply be the scanned page images, this could be a boon.  It will allow material inside the book to be located from a Google search where, until now, the [...]

[Read more →]

A new venture, Vodafone Books on Mobile, has launched in the UK with global ambitions to bring books to mobile phone users. The initial offering centres around audio books but the company behind it sees text-based ebooks as an expanding part of their offering as mobile screens improve. The service is a partnership between Vodafone [...]

[Read more →]