Technology, E-book | featured news

At last, Harry Potter's adventures are available electronically. The seven novels about J.K. Rowling's boy wizard are for sale as e-books and audio books on the author's Pottermore website, the site's creators announced Tuesday.

Apple on Thursday lifted the veil on its plans to remake the educational landscape in a way that centers on its best-selling tablet computer, the iPad. "Education is deep in Apple's DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of marketing, said in a statement.

Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.

Kindles, Nooks and iPads can do many amazing things, but they can’t bump you ahead in line at the Reston Regional Library. In fact, if you want to borrow a book, it may be quicker to put down your sleek new device and head into the stacks.

Amazon announced Thursday that it has launched a Kindle lending library for owners of its e-reader who are also subscribers to its Amazon Prime service. Prime members can borrow one book a month, with no due dates. Users are allowed to have one book out at a time, the company said in a press release. All notes, bookmarks and highlights made on the borrowed book will still be there if the customer later purchases or re-borrows the book.

In a change for the book industry Hyperink generally does not select from books that are submitted by authors. Instead, the company finds topics that are in demand through analysis of things like Google search trends. Then it seeks out authors for those topics. “It’s the reverse of the traditional book publishing industry, which is supply-driven, where you get manuscripts and pick from them,” Gao says. Does that sound like blog writing, where a bunch of similar stories all target certain hot keywords? In some ways, Gao says, but Hyperink’s books are structured, organized and written by experts in their fields. Instead of spending one or two years to publish a physical book and trying for big mega-hits, Hyperink is going the opposite direction. It focuses on fast publishing–it can churn out a book in a month at one-tenth the cost of physical books, Gao says. It’s also going after the “long tail” with topics such as “Getting Corporate Law Jobs,” “Dating For Singles Over 40,” and “Marketing Your Android App.”

Facebook announced Tuesday that it was acquiring Push Pop Press, an interactive digital e-book publisher, although Facebook said it did not plan to enter the book industry.

FOR decades, even after it was renamed and relocated from its original home at Radcliffe, the Columbia Publishing Course seemed unchanging, a genteel summer tradition in the book business, a white-glove six-week course in which ambitious college graduates were educated in the time-honored basics of book editing, sales, cover design and publicity. Not this summer.

Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday said that, after less than four years of selling electronic books, it's now selling more of them than printed books. The online retailer said that since April 1, it has sold 105 e-books for every 100 printed books, including printed books for which there is no electronic edition. The comparison excludes free e-books, which would tip the scales further if they were included.