There’s big news in the ebook industry today. Rakuten has announced that they are purchasing OverDrive for 410 million dollars in cash. The acquisition is expected to be finalized next month, April 2015. OverDrive is the leading platform for ebook and audiobook lending to public and school libraries, with over 30,000 supported libraries worldwide. Rakuten, […]
eBooks
Write On by Kindle is Amazon’s New Community for Writers
This past week Amazon officially introduced Write On by Kindle, a new website where readers and writers can get together to work on honing stories and writing skills. You can read books that are works-in-progress, including everything from short stories to novels, that writers have posted. You can offer feedback and suggestions to other writers, […]
Google Play’s 3rd Birthday eBook Deals – Amazon Price Matching
The Google Play Store turned 3 years old last week. To celebrate, Google is running a bunch of deals in the Play Store for ebooks and magazines, as well as music, apps, and movies. For ebooks, Google’s 3rd birthday promotion involves starting a new trilogy for $3. A number of highly-popular titles are included in […]
B&N Using New Nook DRM Key, Sending Even More Customers Away
Sometimes it seems like someone on the inside at Barnes and Noble is secretly trying to take down the Nook business from the inside out. That’s about the only thing that could explain the continued bad decisions that keep sending more and more people away from Barnes and Noble’s Nook devices and Nook books. This […]
OverDrive Fixes Technical Issue with Kindle Library eBooks
Yesterday OverDrive announced that they have resolved a technical issue with their library ebook lending service that had caused a number of Kindle-formatted ebooks not to appear available for lending. The glitch affected newer titles added to the system since the beginning of this calendar year. Now that OverDrive has become aware of the issue, […]
BookBub Offers Daily eMails for Free and Discounted eBooks
A reader sent in a tip yesterday about a popular service called BookBub that sends out daily email notifications highlighting various ebook deals, discount promotions and free ebooks from major ebook retailers. You can choose what types of notifications to receive across categories and genres that interest you. And the service is free to use. […]
Amazon to Publish First 10 Kindle Scout eBooks
Yesterday Amazon announced that they will be publishing their first wave of ebooks next week selected through the Kindle Scout program. About four months back, Amazon launched the Kindle Scout program that gives authors the opportunity to submit unpublished work where readers choose which titles they want to see published based on reading a sample. […]
How to Enable Text-to-Speech on iPad & iPhone for Kindle, iBooks, etc
Last week I posted a text-to-speech review for Kindle devices and a reader left a tip about how to enable text-to-speech for Kindle ebooks using an iPad or iPhone. The iOS Kindle app doesn’t support TTS normally but you can use a screen reading accessibility feature on iOS devices running iOS 8 and newer to […]