New Kindle may come with King-sized content

by Steven W. Beattie

Today, Amazon has announced the release of Kindle 2, the new version of its popular Kindle e-reader. Priced at U.S.$359, the new version of the device includes an improved display, with 16 different shades of grey (who knew?), 25% longer battery life, and the capability of storing 1,500 books.

And, according to the Wall Street Journal, one selling point may be a new work of fiction by Stephen King, produced exclusively (at least in the short term) for the device.

It is possible that the King work — in which a Kindle-like device plays a role in the story — could be published as part of a physical book at a later date by the author’s current publisher, Scribner, an imprint of CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster publishing arm. Scribner last November published Mr. King’s most recent book, “Just After Sunset: Stories.”

Efforts to elicit an email response from Mr. King were unsuccessful. Spokesmen for Amazon and Simon & Schuster both declined to comment.

This Quillblogger has in the past got into some hot water for daring to criticize the unchallenged ascendency of e-readers, and will refrain from doing so here. Presumably Oprah’s endorsement last fall (which, according to theWSJ might have contributed to the device’s unavailability over the crucial Christmas selling season), along with the King story, will result in healthy sales for Kindle 2.

Ontario school library funding comes through

by Stuart Woods

Ontario’s elementary school libraries – and the retailers and wholesalers that supply them with books – can breathe a sigh of relief: a much needed influx of funding, promised by Premier Dalton McGuinty during the 2007 election campaign, has finally come through.

The initial influx of $15-million (part of a promised $80-million) has already been divvied up among individual school boards, with each elementary school in the province set to receive a base sum of $1,500, plus additional monies calculated based on school size. The libraries can use that money to buy books from a list of 73 qualified vendors, who applied to the program last fall.

The list of vendors was first due to appear as early as last October, and the delay prompted concerns that the funds would not be forthcoming.

However, agreements with qualified retailers and wholesalers began to go out last week, and the ministry expects to have deals in place by the end of February, at which point the school libraries can begin placing orders. (For now, the vendor list has yet to be made public.) Those agreements will be valid for two years, a ministry spokesperson told Quillblog, with the ministry having the option to extend the agreement by two more years after that.

Peter Carey stands up for imperiled Australian publishing

by Stuart Woods

According to Peter Carey, publishing Down Under is in crisis. And the threat – that Australian publishers will “have their roles reduced to that of distributor in a global corporate chain” – may sound familiar to Canadian readers.

Carey’s fears are prompted by the Australian Parliament’s decision to review the country’s protectionist copyright law, which the two-time Booker-winning author argues is what has allowed Australian literature to flourish in the first place. As it currently stands:

Australian publishers have a window of 30 days to bring out an Australian edition of a book once it has been released anywhere in the world. If they do so, then Australian bookshops have to sell the Australian version, and can’t import the book from overseas. This can mean that books are more expensive – and harder to get hold of – in Australia than they are elsewhere, but also allows the country’s local publishing to flourish, rather than forcing it to compete with a flood of cheaper-priced editions from overseas. (via The Guardian)

In Canada, retailers are obliged to stock the Canadian edition of a book, so long as it is priced within 10% of a U.S. one. Carey argues that Australia’s even stricter laws need to be protected.

As long as we have a territorial copyright our publishers have a commercial argument to support Australian literature. They will battle for the sake of our readers and our writers, even if their owners have no personal commitment to the strange loves and needs of Australian readers, or the cultural integrity and future of the Australian nation.

Take copyright away from them, and they no longer have a commercial leg to stand on. And then? Then the global companies will decide that their Australian offices will be much more profitable as distributors of product than publishers of books. If this sounds creepily colonial, it is because it is.

Another new format?

by Eric Emin Wood

We’ve all heard of audiobooks, but videobooks?

HarperCollins is trying to pitch short films of authors summarizing their books (until recently known as an online promotional trailer) as a new format – even going so far as to sell the resulting 23 minutes on Amazon for slightly less than the cost of a new paperback.

Even if watching Jeff Jarvis talk about his book, What Would Google Do?, turned out to be as informative as reading the book would be, how do you consult it for reference? Sure it saves on printing costs, but so do e-books and audiobooks – without sacrificing valuable content.

If HarperCollins wants to move into the self-help video market, they should just say so

More books on phones

by Stuart Woods

Remember when cell phones were considered to be solely the accoutrements of inveterate workaholics? Well, people with eyes glued to their iPhones – and other mobile devices – now have a culturally legitimate excuse, with Google’s announcement that it is making some of the books it’s been digitizing available for free for cell phone users.

The Globe and Mail reports:

The Internet search leader announced today it is making more than 500,000 books already in the public domain available for free to smart-phone users through a mobile version of its Google Book Search website. Readers in the United States will have access to more than 1.5 million books through the service.

The new service will be compatible with Google’s G1 Android phone, the iPhone, and several phones from Nokia, the Globe reports.

However, there are still plenty of old fashioned types out there who are standing by their trusty e-readers. Here, the technology website Ars Technica weighs in on why the uptake for commercial e-books has been “excruciatingly – and yes, you guessed it, unjustly – slow.”