Library Stuff

“Amazon.com, Inc. today announced “Whispercast for Kindle,” giving schools and business customers a simple, scalable online tool for deploying Kindle devices and Kindle content. Whispercast provides a single access point to easily purchase and distribute Kindle books and documents for educational, marketing and employee incentive programs across Kindle devices and free Kindle reading applications for iPad, iPhone, Android phones and tablets, PCs and Macs. In the coming months, Whispercast will support distribution of Kindle Fire applications.”

via Amazon

LifeHacker – “Sorting through the Amazon store for free ebooks can be a bit of a mess. To simplify the process Zero Dollar Books is a simple webapp that aggregates all the best selling free ebooks and shows them off in a nice clean view.”

NBC New York – “Queens Library is lending 50 e-readers loaded with books to library-goers as part of a pilot program to test the concept. The library said it would start making the e-readers available on Thursday at its Central Library in Jamaica to people with a Queens Library card and photo ID.

The devices come pre-loaded with books in one of five themes — best-sellers, romances, mysteries, teens’ books or children’s books.”

eBookNewser – “We’ve all read lots of survey results on eReaders and who’s buying them, and here’s another one, only this time it’s focused on the Kindle and Kindle Fire. Citi released a report this week explaining the ‘buy’ recommendation they have on Amazon’s stock. As part of their research, they surveyed 1,100 online consumers here in the US. Needless to say, they’re pleased with what they found.”

Press Release – “The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library continues to grow rapidly, now offering more than 100,000 books that Amazon Prime members with Kindles can borrow for free—including over 100 New York Times Best Sellers like The Hunger Games trilogy—as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. “Kindle Owners’ Lending Library continues to grow rapidly – with over 100,000 titles, customers can choose to borrow a variety of breakout, best-selling titles for free, including ‘Nobody’ by Creston Mapes, ‘The Walk’ by Lee Goldberg and ‘Abducted’ by Theresa Ragan, as well as Kindle Singles from best-selling authors Andy Borowitz, Karin Slaughter and Mishka Shubaly,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. “It’s also become a meaningful way to grow royalties for authors like Patricia Hester, who sold less than 200 books in 2011 prior to joining KDP Select and has now earned over $36,000 from KDP Select in one month as readers have discovered her books through this service.”

Wired – “Amazon unveiled a long-rumored “Netflix-for-books” digital lending library Wednesday. Via yet another enhancement for Amazon Prime, subscribers who also own Kindles can borrow one (and only one) book per month from about 5,000 available titles. Once borrowed, you keep the book for as long as you like — there is no due date after which DRM will cripple the file.”

Boston Globe – “A surge in demand for electronic books is pushing public libraries to rethink their traditional collections of bound volumes, and wrestle with new privacy concerns and the disparate lending policies set by publishers. Since the beginning of the year, several area librarians said, booming interest in e-readers, such as Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, has led to dramatic jumps in the number of e-books being checked out. E-book downloads at the Public Library of Brookline have jumped from 119 in September 2010 to 537 last month, said its director, Chuck Flaherty.”

Techcrunch – “As reported earlier this year, Amazon and digital content distribution service OverDrive are teaming up to bring Kindle library lending to thousands of public libraries across the U.S. That partnership, rumored to be launching this month, has apparently now gone live in select locations. According to postings on Amazon’s Kindle Forum, some users are already seeing this option in the Seattle area. A page on Amazon’s website describing the new service has also gone live.”

Book Bench – “Last week, Amazon announced the launch of @Author, a new feature for the Kindle that will enable readers to highlight a particular passage of an e-book in order to ask its author a question about it. As yet, it’s operating only in a limited beta version, but a number of high-profile writers—among them Susan Orlean, Steven Johnson, and Timothy Ferriss—have already signed up. (There’s been no announcement thus far on whether Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy plan to get on board). It’s a development of which Holden Caulfield might have approved. “What really knocks me out,” as he put it, “is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” Holden’s creator, it should be said, was not himself noted for his openness to such overtures from readers”

ebookNewser – “Twitter is a buzz Sunday night with the news that Amazon had added social networking features to the Kindle support site at kindle.amazon.com. Kindle users can now create a profile page, follow other Kindle users, share details about their reading habits, and so on. I’m not sure that this qualifies as news, other than the fact it happened so quietly. The new features appear to have been launched quite some time ago; there are some users with hundreds if not thousands of followers.”