By YUKARI IWATANI KANE And ETHAN SMITH With the new tablet device that is debuting next week, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs is betting he can reshape businesses like textbooks, newspapers and television much the way his iPod revamped the music industry—and expand Apple’s influence and revenue as a content middleman. In developing the device, Apple focused on [...]

14.10.09 Catherine Neilan Google is poised to launch its “buy anywhere, read anywhere” digital books programme Google Editions simultaneously in the US, UK and Europe within the first half of next year. Speaking at the Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt, Amanda Edmonds, Google’s director of strategic partnerships, said the programme would be rolled out [...]

(International Herald Tribune) By Brad Stone Published: March 19, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO: Aiming to outdo Amazon.com and recapture the crown for the most digital titles in an e-book library, Sony is announcing Thursday a deal with Google to make a half million copyright-free books available for its Reader device, a rival to the Amazon Kindle. [...]

On TechCrunch by Jason Kincaid on March 17, 2009 Online document sharing site Scribd has announced that it has partnered with a number of major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications, to legally offer some of their content to Scribd’s community free of charge. Publishers have begun to add [...]

(New York Times) I don’t mean to turn this column into All E-Books, All the Time. But Amazon pulled a nice one-two P.R. punch. Two weeks ago, it released its Kindle 2 electronic book reader, and announced that its catalog of electronic books had hit 240,000 titles. You can download them wirelessly to the Kindle, [...]

An iTunes moment? THINGS are suddenly hotting up in the rather obscure field of electronic books and their associated reading devices, the best known of which is Amazon’s Kindle. A new, sleeker version of the Kindle was unveiled on February 9th. Just days earlier, Google said it was making 1.5m free e-books available in a [...]