Founder of the Waterstone bookshop chain, Tim Waterstone will join, Jamie Byng, whose publishing house Canongate published Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father and the global success, Life Of Pi, author Matthew Kneale and journalist Rachel Cooke in the Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire to debate the future of reading, writing and books.

The session takes place on Sunday 12th September at 1.45pm as part of Dun Laoghaire Rathdown’s book festival, Mountains To Sea which is entering it’s second year in 2010.

The discussion comes at a time of great change in the world of books and the panel will explore this new digital landscape. With the launch in Ireland of Apple iPad and news that Amazon’s newest Kindle device is both the best selling Kindle ever and the best selling product on Amazon there will be much to discuss.

This article was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 5th August 2010 14.11 UTC

Amazon today launched its UK Kindle Store, with more than 400,000 ebooks now available to download. The price and scope of the digitised books marks a significant point in Amazon’s move towards domination in the ebooks market.

Up against increasing competition in the market, Amazon last week unveiled two more advanced versions of its Kindle e-reader.

The company is looking to pick up consumers who cannot afford Apple’s iPad. In the US, Amazon has slashed the price of its Kindle device to compete with the iPad, which uses the iBook store to sell ebooks.

More than 80 of the 100 Nielsen UK bestsellers are available to download from the new UK store, retailing at relatively low prices. One of the new bookstore’s featured authors, the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, last week became the first author to sell more than 1m ebooks through Amazon.

Larsson’s novel The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is currently second in the Kindle store’s bestsellers list and available for £2.70 to UK buyers.

“The Kindle Store offers the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read at low prices,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle content at Amazon.

In the US, digital books account for 6% of consumer sales. Many publishers now realise the need to follow the direction of the market.

Amazon’s new Kindle devices are lighter, faster and smaller than the previous generation. The Wi-Fi model costs £109 in the UK, while the model supporting both Wi-Fi and 3G will retail at £149 – both around £25 more than the US retail price.

Previously, UK Kindle owners had to get their device shipped from the US, with subsequent book purchases retailed in dollars.

Greg Greeley, vice president of European retail at Amazon, said: “The opening of the UK Kindle Store allows customers to buy content in pounds sterling and offers a great shopping experience including UK customer reviews, recommendations, bestseller lists and customer service.”

Though Amazon rarely releases definitive figures on Kindle sales, the company says the original device has sold “millions” – it has been the bestselling item on Amazon.com for two years running.

Last month, the company revealed that it sold 143 Kindle ebooks for every 100 hardbacks sold in the previous three months in the US, although no figures were released about the relative proportion of paperbacks sold in this time.

Amazon and Apple face investigations into their ebook retailing. The office of Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut attorney general, says that the companies could be “potentially depriving consumers of competitive prices” and that the burgeoning nature of the market “warranting [a] prompt review of the potential anti-consumer impacts.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This article was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 28th July 2010 13.27 UTC

The late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson has beaten Stephenie Meyer and James Patterson to become the first author to sell more than one million ebooks on Amazon.

The online retailer said yesterday that Larsson, author of the Millennium trilogy, had become the first member of its new “Kindle Million Club”, for authors whose work has sold over a million copies in Amazon’s Kindle store in the US. The crime novelist is likely to be joined by thriller writer Patterson – Amazon said last week that it had sold over 860,000 of his ebooks – while Twilight scribe Meyer, Sookie Stackhouse creator Charlaine Harris and queen of romantic suspense Nora Roberts have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books in the US.

“Larsson’s books have captivated millions of readers around the world and ignited a voracious interest in the lives of its main characters Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blomqvist,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle content. “It’s been exciting to have been a part of introducing so many people to these great books.”

The novelist’s three books – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – currently top Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list, and are also in the top 10 bestselling Kindle books of all time, according to the retailer.

The books have also topped Amazon’s UK Kindle chart for “a good few months”, said Iain Millar, marketing manager at Larsson’s UK publisher Quercus, and are currently at the top of Waterstone’s ebook bestseller list.

But Millar said that UK ebook sales for Larsson were “nowhere near the million mark, which is indicative of the extent to which the US ebook market is ahead of ours”.

“Broadly, the print books are equally popular in the States and in the UK, but uptake of the electronic version is much higher there, primarily because a much higher proportion of book customers in the States own ebook devices,” he said.

Quercus has sold 3.3m copies of Larsson’s books in the UK, and estimates that worldwide sales of the three novels are somewhere between 35-40m copies, “but they are literally selling too fast to count”, said Millar.

The news about Larsson’s ebook sales follows Amazon’s announcement last week that over the past three months it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardback books. Kindle sales accelerated in the past month alone, when the online retailer said it sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardbacks. The figures cover Amazon’s US book business, include hardback sales when there is no Kindle edition and exclude free Kindle books.

The retailer made no mention of the proportion of paperback salesto Kindle sales, but founder Jeff Bezos stressed that ebooks were not cannibalising print, saying that hardback purchases at Amazon were still growing and that Kindles had overtaken them regardless.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Yesterday Robert Maguire wrote a long review post on some of the freely available iPad book Apps.

These apps allow readers to download books to their iPads and read them. Nearly all of them offer works for free that are currently in the Public Domain (That is books that have either been published by authors who have died before 1939 as copyright extends for the life of the author plus seventy years or books that have been placed in the public domain by their authors for a variety of reasons).

If you wish to buy books however, other than as stand alone apps, which IS currently possible directly though the iPad App Store, you will need to buy them in Apps other than iBooks.

The Kindle App for iPad is currently in the top Twenty free apps and it offers books for free and for purchase. Kobo also offers books for sale. Both require credit cards.

As soon as we have more information on other devices, we will update this note

This morning iBooks is the number one free iPad App in Ireland.

Amazon’s Kindle for iPad app, at number eleven is just outside the top ten free Apps.

The Elements: A Visual Exploration published by Touch Press is the top ranked paid book app at number 15 in the overall list of paid apps.

Drilling down to the paid apps in the book section, The Elements: A Visual Exploration is at number one, the full version of Disney’s toy Story Read Along App at number two, Alice for the iPad at number three, Self Help Classics at number four and The Cat In The Hat by Dr. Seuss at number five.

iBooks is joined by the Kindle App, Marvel Comics App, Toy Story Read Along App and the Free Books App in the top five free book apps.

For more on reading and book apps, read Robert Maguire’s post from yesterday: To E Or Not To E: A Beginner’s Guide To iPad Ereading Apps.

This week Amazon announced that, for the first time ever on Amazon.com, ebooks had outsold hardbacks, proving that whilst some of us are reluctant to part with our beloved bound volumes, there is an ever increasing number embracing the concept of electronic reading.

And with Apple‘s much heralded iPad finally launching on these shores, we decided to take a look at some of the various apps available for reading books on your iPads, iPods and iPhones, and determine which, if any, are worth their salt.

Kindle has one of the most appealing interfaces- they’ve recognised that swiping seems to be the most intuitive way of turning a page, a feature which some developers have criminally failed to include.

As far as features go, it sticks to the basics, with the ability to bookmark pages, search text, and change the font size and colour. As a basic eReader, Kindle does the trick nicely without many frills attached.

Furthermore, the iFlow range is rather limited, covering primarily classics, and educational texts (philosophy, psychology, etc.). What the iFlow reader does have in its corner, however, is its unique interface.

Utilising the accelerometer, the app scrolls the text along the screen, with the degree of tilting determining the speed of the scrolling. For ease of reading, this this method is by far the most natural. I’ve already gotten through two novels…

Don’t like the line spacing? You can change it. Margins irritating you? No Problem. The somewhat frustrating problem of automatic page rotation is dealt with (why Apple never considered that someone would look at their iPhone while lying down is beyond me), with the ability to lock the page in landscape or portrait mode.
Social networking fans can immediately share what they’re reading through facebook or twitter via a menu of shortcuts which, of course, you can customise.

Arguably its most convenient addition is the concept of assignable hot-keys. The user can designate an action to a particular touch or movement- for example, using the classic pinch and spread motion to adjust font size.

With a wide selection enabling downloads from a variety of eBook retailers, Lexcycle seem to have covered all the bases, providing one of the best eReading apps available. (Lexcycle was acquired by Amazon in 2009)

The experience of Kobo holds up well beyond the opening screen, with a number of ways of going from page to page. This seems to be its main area of customisation, with the other options being quite basic (font size, brightness, etc.).

In offering extra page turning options it pushes itself ahead of basic reading apps, but some of these choices are impractical to the degree that they become useless (manual scrolling??). As far as selection is concerned, Kobo fares very well, and once you’ve created a Kobo account you can purchase and download titles directly through the app itself.

Comics, quite simply, are amazing to read on an iPad. The screen lends itself fabulously to the images, and the technology offers a number of interesting ways to get through the story. For example, this app offers animated transitions, where the panels are displayed one by one, offering a dynamic reading experience well suited to the subject matter.

The app also capitalises on the periodical nature of comic books, offering an update service similar to podcast management, where new issues of subscribed series are automatically downloaded and added to your library. As far as the iPad is concerned, this is one area where the full potential of the medium is explored, and to great effect.

App: ibooks | Developer: Apple | Rating: 4/5
Apple’s own reading app is cosmetically appealing, offering a bookshelf interface similar to Kobo, but endeavors to offer a customisation level similar to Stanza. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite manage to win out in either category, but provides a solid app with several interesting features nonetheless.

Its actual reading interface is one of the most appealing available, particularly when viewed on the iPad, and provides one of the most generally pleasurable reading experiences. Among its attempts at offering functions beyond the basics, iBooks offers a dictionary, accesible through double tapping a word.

While convenient, the strength of this app lies in its style, and its selection, which offers tens of thousands of titles through Apple’s iBookstore (though the selection for Ireland is currently only Public Domain works, this should change soon).

Amazon’s ebook milestone: digital sales outstrip hardbacks for first time in US
Amazon sold more kindle ebooks than hardback books in the last three months
Read more…

A Look at Mexico City’s Book Kiosks
Nice feature from Publishing Perspectives
Read more…

A glimpse into the eighteenth century book trade: How to encourage book buying
Rather nice this one!
Read more…

Irish Times review Blood Money.
Good news for Arlene, nice review!
Read more…

Edinburgh!
Laura’s off to Edinburgh. I know some folks already there and others going. Sounds like fun!
Read more…

Novel Workshop 2010-2011
This is not a cheap workshop!
Read more…

Review of Gallows Lane by Brian McGilloway (Pan, 2008)
Doesn’t spare the author, but overall good takaway.
Read more…

Review: Capital Sins by Peter Cunningham
Great review for Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins
Read more…

Clare County Library launches Children’s Book Festival on October 1st 2010 with best-selling author Darren Shan.
This is pretty big deal!
Read more…

Over 17,000 links added to library website
Now this is very cool
Read more…

Brutal harvest
Seems to me that Crime fiction has finally broken fully onto the Times books pages
Read more…

A curious treatment of the Troubles
This is a decent review in the sense of searching
Read more…

Chips off the old Irish block
Interesting review
Read more…

He lived fast and died young, but how good a writer was Behan?
Nice piece on Brendan Behan
Read more…

Ohmigod They’ve Shot Kenny, Etc.
Nice post & the Kenny videos are great!
Read more…

Bookfest Poster Revealed
Nice poster
Read more…

A bittersweet look at life
In 2007, Catherine O’Flynn was a little-known first-time author. After 20 rejections, her book What Was Lost was published by a tiny Birmingham publishing company.
Read more…

artemis find his nice side . . .
A preview for Artemis Fowl!
Read more…

On the Riverbank
Oisin gives an audience
Read More…

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE USES OF PESSIMISM by Roger Scruton
Enjoyable review by Declan!
Read more…

Opening lines
I do love the Terry Pratchett! My favourite is surely Sam Vimes!
Read more…

The Four Colour Pen
Nice story! Nicely told too!
Read more…

How to Build a Great Kids’ Library
Love this!
Read more…

PARKBENCH TURNS TWO!
Go Park Bench! Pleased for them!
Read more…

Amazon Cuts Kindle Price, New iOS Releases, and More
Will this make you buy?
Read more…

Is the Focus on Devices and Not Readers a Big Mistake?
I think we can all agree here that the answer is yes!
Read more…

Thanks to You, I’ve Been Shortlisted for the Queen of Teen Award!
Read more…

Big publishers have reason to be happy about how the book market is evolving
Mike is right in the specific but you will see below that I disagreed in the general!
Read more…

Staying Sober in Thailand
I came to Thailand almost a decade ago as a drunk on his last legs. [Worth reading]
Read more…

Pearson stays on top as world’s largest book publisher
Mostly this doesn’t surprise me terribly
Read more…

Introducing, Northern Irish sci-fi author Owen Quinn
Sci-Fi is a genre Irish authors don’t have a huge presence in. As a huge fan, I’d like to see that change!
Read more…

After three and a half years of working in advertising in the UK Oisín McGann became increasingly concerned for his immortal soul. He returned to Ireland in the summer of 2002 much as he had left – with no job, no home and some meagre savings. He set himself up as a freelance illustrator, before getting his first books published in 2003. Oisin now works full-time as a writer and illustrator. He lives somewhere in the Irish countryside, where he won’t be heard shouting at his computer.
He is an active blogger and one of the most prominent Irish authors on the impact and effects of digital change on writing and publishing, we’ve asked him to contribute a note on his recent free ebook experiments.

When I was working in advertising, websites were only just starting to become popular in business. A number of our clients thought that this would be an exciting new way to advertise their companies – imagine, everyone on the web would see them! But it soon became clear that a website is more like a brochure than an ad – a way to convey more information, after you have made the first contact. You have to get people to your site in the first place, before you can inform about all the great things you can sell them. And how do you get them there?

The same can be said now for any blog, particularly if you’re an author of fiction. You can convey a greater quantity and quality of information – it doesn’t automatically get you more readers, but creates a better, and ongoing, relationship with the ones you have, and helps spread any news through those closer contacts.

So when, last year, I came up with the idea of releasing an ebook novella entitled The Vile Desire to Scream to promote my steampunk trilogy, The Wildenstern Saga (Bk1, Bk2), I didn’t automatically look on it as a means of getting more sales for The Wisdom of Dead Men (ED: There’s a nice Bookgeek review here), the second book. It could only form part of all the promotional work I do for my books. And I knew getting into this (having done it before), that self-publishing could be hugely time-consuming. And it was an investment of time and effort that was, on the face of it, a completely daft idea considering I was planning to give the book away for free.

I had the idea for the story, and got to work on it in whatever spare time I had. That was the easy bit, and at just over 16,000 words I knew it would be a quick, easy read. I wanted to produce something someone could read during a lunch-break. Once it was written, I was determined to edit it properly, which I did – helped first by my editor at Random House for the broad strokes, than by a few of my family. While that was going on, I did the design up for the cover, incorporating some of the design elements from the covers of the first two Wildenstern novels. The illustration is a mix of painting, photography and a lot of fiddling in Photoshop – much as the original Wildenstern covers were produced by Random House. This was all stuff I had done before, and though it was time-consuming, it was straightforward enough.

But then it came to creating the final, downloadable file.

I could create a PDF from the Word file easily enough; I’ve been using PDFs for years, and they are now a standard output file in print production. As with a printout, what you get is pretty much what you see on-screen when you create it. And I was sure that most people would actually download PDFs. For all the talk about eReaders, most onscreen reading is still done off a computer screen. But I was adamant that people would be able to download this for eReaders too – and I wanted the ebook to work on as many platforms as possible.

As anybody who has tried them knows, PDFs are ugly and clumsy on eReaders. The main reason for this is that PDF formatting isn’t flexible – on the contrary, it’s designed to keep its shape, staying faithful to the creator’s version of the document. If you try to resize the type on your eReader, you get ugly breaks and hard returns all over the place. I wanted the reading experience of The Vile Desire to Scream to be as close to a printed book as possible, wherever it was read. I wasn’t prepared to release the book until I had an epub file, which is the most common type now – used by Apple and Sony among others – and a Mobipocket, for the Kindle and the Iliad.

An ebook file is constructed more like a website than a word processing document. Instead of the type being set in place as if you were going to print it, it can flow into different shaped pages – depending on the device being used to read it – and display in different sizes. But you still need decent typesetting to make it readable on the page; line spacing, controlled tracking and kerning (the spacing between the letters), new paragraphs, chapter breaks and so on. So the text in an ebook file comes with built-in instructions telling it how to behave when it fills a page, no matter what size or shape that page is. If you get these instructions wrong when you’re creating your file, you can get some very unpredictable results at the reading end – which completely defeats the point of producing an ebook file.

I started using an application called eCub, but whether it was the fact that I was using a Mac, or (more likely) I just couldn’t get my head around the logic, anything I converted just didn’t come out right. My brother and I started using another application called Calibre, and this one was much easier to use. The tools made it possible to convert a Word document to a very basic epub file. But to fine-tune the formatting, it still demanded a knowledge of html. This is where my brother Marek came in, and after I’d set up the epub file, he got it to work properly and then was able to make a Mobipocket one, although that presented its own problems too.

As I mentioned at the start, there was no point in putting it up on the site and then letting it sit there, hoping people would find it. So I drew up a list of people to inform about it. I didn’t want to spam it, so I chose about thirty people and organizations that I either had a good working relationship with, or would have a specific interest in it. In the month between the release around the 8th of April and the time of writing this article, there have been 368 registered downloads of the book; 292 of those were PDFs, and 76 were epub files. There haven’t been enough downloads of the Mobipocket file to register on the stats. There was obviously a surge in the first few weeks, and now it’s quietened down to a few a day. Of course, there’s no way of knowing how many of the downloaded files have been passed on to other people – they’re out there now, so they could go anywhere. That’s the nature of the beast.

Having done all of this once, it will be much easier to do it the second time round – although it will always be time-consuming – and I will definitely be producing more of these. A bit like free pieces of software, these will be self-contained short stories that work on their own, but each can also create a doorway into the full version – the associated novel that I want to sell. I don’t expect The Vile Desire to Scream to work in isolation, it is just another promotional tool. I’ll continue to mention it during my sessions, and like the website and the blog, it will provide a way in for visitors to the site to learn more about what I do. And that has always been the aim.

So, time to get back to writing stuff that pays . . .

Liberties Press has begun offering customers PDF ebook editions of some of its books.

Liberties Press are the first Irish trade publisher to make ebooks available directly in this way, though Lapwing Poetry has done so for some time and several publishers have either Kindle of epub editions available through third party stores like Amazon and Directebooks.

Liberties ebooks will be priced at about 33% below the print prices and the first titles to be made available are:
Second Readings by Eileen Battersby
Stop Wasting Your Money by Conor Pope
Make Your Will by Jason Dunne and John G.Murphy
Step On, Step Up by Donna Kennedy
Surviving the Axe by Lisa O’Callaghan