Grisham: Printed books are endangered species

He’s sold more than 250 million books around the world — but even John Grisham is worried about the future of the printed word in the wake of deep discounting of best-sellers by major retailers and the advent of e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle.

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Sony plans a Kindle rival with wireless downloads

Sony Corp. plans to offer an e-book reader with the ability to wirelessly download books, injecting more competition in a small but fast-growing market by adopting a key feature of the rival Kindle from Amazon.com.

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Phones, PCs put e-book within reach of Kindle-less

A few weeks ago, Pasquale Castaldo was waiting at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport for a delayed flight, when a man sitting across from him pulled out an Amazon Kindle book-reading device.

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Kindle Helps Tiny E-Book Market

More than four months after Amazon.com released the Kindle, no one is sure whether the latest e-book reader is really hot — or not. But publishers believe that the Kindle has helped, if not revolutionized, the tiny electronic market.

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Rowling: No E-Book for Harry Potter VII

Sorry, e-book fans, whoever you are. You will be able to read the new Harry Potter on paper, listen to it, probably purchase it in Braille. But don't expect to download the text — at least legally.

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Apple may be coming out with a Table to rival the Kindle.

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We don't even know for sure whether Apple will ever release a tablet–although there's lots of compelling evidence that it will–and already there's a lively debate about whether the company is interested in using said tablet to do to printed reading materials what iTunes …

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On Wednesday, iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics that already makes one of Europe's best-known e-readers, plans to announce that it is entering the United States market with a $399 touch-screen e-reader.

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A few weeks ago, Pasquale Castaldo was waiting at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport for a delayed flight when a man sitting across from him pulled out an Amazon Kindle book-reading device. "Gee, maybe I should think about e-books myself," thought Castaldo, 54.

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The e-publishing market may be following the same steps as its relatives in the music industry as Sony announced Wednesday that it will adopt the open ePub format for its Reader e-book readers.

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The move is the first price drop on any Kindle since the original was reduced to $359 and puts a larger gap between this and the larger Kindle DX, which still sits at its original $489 price.

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Cnet reviews and rates the following e-book readers: Cool-er e-book reader, Sony Reader Digital Book PRS-700BC, Amazon Kindle 2, Amazon Kindle DX

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Arnie wants California to say 'Hasta la vista' text books. Do you agree that classrooms should be 'paperless'? (Poll)

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote about California's digital books initiative in the San Jose Mercury News the other day.

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In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google.

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Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project, has teamed up with Bloomsbury to edit a new series of books that will look at topics including the ethics of genetics and the cyber enhancement of humans. The series will be the first fro …

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"The reality is we have too many ways to get our information for free."

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Electronic books may be the fastest growing segment of the publishing world, but some authors are still not interested in participating. You won't, for instance, find any of the Harry Potter novels in digital format.

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E-books offer a paradigm shift in the market place because specialty market books will be published. The costs of printing, warehousing, and shipping books are gone. The market life of the book becomes indefinite.

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All you really need to know about the dangers of digital commodification you learned in kindergarten. Think back. Remember swapping your baloney sandwich for Jell-o pudding? Now, imagine handing over your sandwich and getting just a spoon.

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Fictionwise has been acquired by Barnes & Noble, said to be the world's largest bookseller, for $15.7 million in a stock deal that TeleRead revealed earlier today.

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While Amazon might be able to find a market for $9.99 books on the Kindle, the iPhone-iPod Touch world is a very different place. Very few people are willing to pay that kind of money for any sort of application, let alone an e-book.

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The almost comically sweeping attempt to reach the world's entire literate population is a reflection of the ambitions of the Google Book Search project, in which the company hopes to digitize every book — famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth — found  …

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Having used both Kindles 1 and 2, I thought it would helpful to list where the new Kindle excels and where it falters.

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"Amazon is agnostic when it comes to DRM with e-books," Amazon spokesman Cinthia Portugal told Wired.com. "We give content owners the choice — we just want to make the content available to readers."

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Kindle is a mass marketing mystery. With little promotion, E-book purchase rates outpace print/bound books by more than 2x. Execs project over $1 billion in revenue. Kindle2 sells mystery: an e-novella from Stephen King, available exclusively to early adapters.

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The pace of the e-book market over the past decade has been excruciatingly—and yes, you guessed it, unjustly—slow. My frustration is much like that of the Mac users of old.

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Who needs an e-book reader from Amazon or Sony when you can download tomes to a smartphone, often at a fraction of the cost. Adam Parks is an avid reader of digital books.

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Last week, American authors and publishers reached an agreement with Google to settle lawsuits over Google's Book Search program, which scans millions of books and makes their contents available on the Internet.

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A factory in Germany has launched production of a super thin electronic reader that was developed at Cambridge University.

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SQUINT hard, and textbook publishers can look a lot like drug makers. They both make money from doing obvious good — healing, educating — and they both have customers who may be willing to sacrifice their last pennies to buy what these companies are selling.

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