My Books!

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Sony's New Move

Welcome to the blog! Today is the second installment of my four part series on ebooks. I found an article from Publisher's Weekly that sounded like a significant move to me and thought I'd share it with you. Enjoy!

Thanks for reading!
Elaine Cantrell
Hope. Dreams. Life... Love
http://www.elainecantrell.com

Sony Adopts EPUB Standard for Reader
By Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 7/24/2008 7:16:00 AM
The International Digital Publishing Forum's epub e-book standard received a big vote of support this morning when Sony announced that effective immediately its Sony Reader will now support the standard. Beginning in August, all new devices shipped will use epub, and right now owners of existing devices can go to http://esupport.sony.com to update their device's software for epub support.

Brennan Mullin, v-p of Sony Audio, said the company was adopting the epub standard to encourage more vendors, booksellers and publishers to get involved in the e-book market and to broaden the amount of content that can be viewed on the Reader. The move to use epub is a significant change in approach for Sony, which has used its own standards and restricted consumers to buying e-books for the Reader from its own store. The use of epub will allow consumers to buy titles from a variety of outlets and will grow the number of titles compatible with the Reader to well passed the 45,000 now available through its online store. Another avenue for new material will be Adobe: Sony also annouced today that the device will support Adobe e-books with DRM and will also have the capability to reflow standard PDF e-books and other documents.

Publishers, who generally favor the one-format approach made possible by epub, welcomed Sony’s decision. “Sony’s support of epub is an important step forward in the cooperation of publishers and portable digital book manufacturers to create better experiences for readers,” said Brent Lewis, v-p digital & internet for Harlequin. “We’re thrilled with the upgrade." IDPF, of which Sony is a member, approved epub as an industrywide standard in an attempt to foster interoperability among e-book reading devices.

Mullin said sales of the Reader have been steady and that sales of titles have increased. Interest in e-books has grown and although reluctant to credit a competitor, Mullin acknowledged that the buzz around Amazon’s Kindle “has been good for everybody in the e-book market.” Amazon, however, has not adopted the epub standard.

In addition to adopting the epub standard, Sony has announced it has started offering the Reader in the U.K.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Five Reasons To Buy Ebooks

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Elaine Cantrell, and I write romance novels. I like to focus on that first breathless thrill when eyes meet across a crowded room. I try to give my readers the feeling that love really could happen to them. Oh, I'll torture them before the end of the book, but rest assured, I always have a happy ending.

I've been published five times, have another book The Best Selling Toy Of The Season coming from MS Publishing in November, and have just signed a new contract with Lachesis Publishing. I'll talk more about my books in the coming weeks, but today I'd like to talk about ebooks.

Ebooks are relatively new in the publishing world. They've had some difficulty gaining acceptance, but schools now teach their students to do lots of their work on computers, so I think ebooks might be what'll they want to read.

If you haven't tried an book, here are five reasons why you should:

1. They cost less. You can buy two instead of one.

2. They don't take up space in your house. You don't have to dust them either.

3. You can impress your friends with you technical jargon and computer literacy.

4. You can discover a world of new and exciting authors.

5. On an ebook reader, a device about the size of a paperback, you can carry your library with you and read from it at any time.

Oh, go on and give it a try. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Thanks for reading!
Elaine Cantrell
Hope. Dreams. Life... Love
http://www.elainecantrell.com