Legitimate e-book lending site taken down by angry authors

A pack of digital authors ganged up on a useful site that connected e-book consumers and shut them down.

The process of lending an e-book is complicated and much of it is a result of conflicting DRM locks and platforms as well as a reluctance on the part of publishers to allow their books to be loaned. But authors can also be a roadblock when it comes to lending, and we’ve just had a classic example of how that can happen with the brouhaha over LendInk, a service that allowed readers to connect with others in order to share e-books. The site has effectively been put out of business by a virtual lynch mob of authors claiming it breached their rights, even though what it was doing was perfectly legal.

 

 

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The Fall of Book Publishing: The Rise of New E-Book Business Models

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Experimenting Our Way to Success – Reinventing Publishing Models

Futurist Thomas Frey:  Amazon revolutionized book reading in 2007 when it introduced its Kindle book reader. Within the past three years, the explosive sale of book readers has caused a massive surge in the sale of e-books, already outpacing the sale of hardcover books, with a prediction by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that they will outsell paperbacks within the next year.

 

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Digital Reading Devices Transforming the Way We Read Books

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“The Elements: A Visual Exploration” on an iPad.

Twelve year old Emma Teitgen thought the chemistry book her teacher recommended would make perfect bedside reading. Perfect because it might help her fall asleep.  Then she downloaded “The Elements: A Visual Exploration” to her iPad. Instead of making her drowsy, it blossomed in her hands. The 118 chemical elements, from hydrogen to ununoctium, came alive in vivid images that could be rotated with a swipe of the finger.

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eBook Sales Will Overtake Print Books Within Five Years

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Sony says sales of ebooks will overtake print books within the next five years.

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading business division, said: “Within five years there will be more digital content sold than physical content. Three years ago, I said within ten years but I realised that was wrong – it’s within five.”

Google To Talk With China’s Copyright Watchdog Over Copyright Violations

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Search engine giant Google is sending a representative to China this week to talk with the country’s copyright watchdog.  The move is designed to cool Chinese authors’ heated complaints against the company over copyright violations, a Google senior executive said yesterday.

 

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China Hoping Chinese Literature Goes Global

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Sanwei Bookshop in central Beijing

China has excelled in recent years at producing Olympic gold medalists, skilled factory workers and more billionaires than any country other than the United States. But authors are another story. The influence of China’s novelists and other writers has long been stunted by the country’s history of censorship and custom of detaining government critics. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, billed as the world’s largest gathering of publishers, government officials said they want to extend China’s cultural clout by persuading the West to read more of its books.

 

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Sony To Begin Selling eBooks In The Digital Standard ePub Format

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Sony’s Reader

Paper books may be low tech, but no one will tell you how and where you can read them.

For many people, the problem with electronic books is that they come loaded with just those kinds of restrictions. Digital books bought today from Amazon.com, for example, can be read only on Amazon’s Kindle device or its iPhone software.

 

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