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Smashwords is continuing to be a self-publishing juggernaut with 101,300 authors now using the service and who collectively published 336,400 titles, up 60,300 titles from 2013. New distribution channels were established in 2014, such as OverDrive, the world's largest ebook supplier serving over 20,000 public libraries, and Txtr, a European retailer. New partners Oyster and Scribd were brought fully online. In all of the hype on another year of success, Smashwords CEO Mark Coker continues to leverage the Amazon boogeyman to promote his company. One of the ways that Smashwords is successful is via their massive distribution system. They will put your books in libraries, on e-Book lending sites and also Amazon, B&N, Apple and many others, as long as its formatted correctly. There is no curation team in place, and the Smashwords mantra is “all books deserved to be published.” In order to continuously grow and attract other authors to the Smashwords platform, Mark Coker actively discourages people from publishing with Amazon. Here are a number of notable quotes throughout 2014. “Authors who fully distributed their titles with Smashwords were partially insulated from the dramatic sales drops many Amazon authors reported following the introduction of Kindle Unlimited. If you know indie authors who only upload to Amazon, invite them to diversify their distribution with Smashwords. ” “I've been speaking out against KDP Select exclusivity since the program first launched in December 2011. In my first post, I cautioned that KDP Select could trap indie authors like tenant farmers tilling Amazon soil. ” “Indies would do well to avoid Kindle Unlimited for one simple reason: it requires KDP Select exclusivity.” “The industry can cry until it’s blue in the face about how Amazon is ruthless and heavy-handed, and how other retailers are kinder and gentler. The truth of the argument doesn’t change the reality. Amazon does what it does because it can, because authors and publishers let them do it, and because it’s in Amazon’s nature to act this way. Lions eat wildebeest.” In all of these blog posts Mark makes, he constantly makes reference to his own company and how its better for authors. In one breath he lambastes Amazon and in the other portrays his company as being the savior to indie authors. There is never any mention on how Amazon controls over 70% of the e-Book market in North America, or how many titles Smashwords sells through them. The Smashwords blog is nothing short of a propaganda machine, used as a self-serving vehicle to promote the company and tear down the competition. Smashwords Continues to be Successful, by Leveraging the Amazon Boogeyman is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Friday, January 2, 2015
Smashwords Continues to be Successful, by Leveraging the Amazon Boogeyman
Scribd Raises $22 Million for New Book Recommendation Service
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Scribd initially started out as a document file sharing service when it launched in 2007. The company diversivied into selling subscriptions for their entire library of e-Books in October 2013. They have raised over $25 million during the lifetime of their business in order to stay operational. Today, the company has just announced they have raised another $22 million dollars. Scribd currently has over 80 million users globally and has an e-Book portfolio of 500,000 titles, including New York Times bestsellers, classics, and reader favorites in every genre. A pioneer of the all-you-can-read model, Scribd's subscriptions service allows readers to have unlimited access to more than 500,000 books from nearly 1,000 publishers, including Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Open Road Media, Lonely Planet, National Geographic, Rosetta, Workman, Wiley and Smashwords. Just a couple of months ago, the company also expanded into digital audiobook, which will be the next big trend. Scribd CEO Trip Adler said the response "beat our expectations." with users accounting for 180,000 listening hours. What does Scribd intend on doing with the capital they have raised? The big plan for 2014 is to improve the overall product, with a focus on algorithmic book recommendations and the reading experience itself, as well as continuing to expand the content available in Scribd. Scribd Raises $22 Million for New Book Recommendation Service is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Onyx Boox AfterGlow 2 Now Available on Amazon for $129
| Back in November when Arta Tech first released the Onyx Boox AfterGlow 2, a 6-inch ebook reader with a frontlit HD E Ink screen and open Android 4.2, it was available exclusively from Onyx-Boox.com for 124 euros. Now Arta Tech has made the AfterGlow 2 more accessible by listing it on Amazon.com for $129 with […] |
How to Recommend eBooks for Libraries to Add to Their Catalog
| The folks at OverDrive posted a 10 most frequently asked questions article today with some helpful tips for librarians and people that get ebooks from public libraries. Number ten on the list highlights a feature that I didn’t know existed. Some public libraries allow customers to recommend specific ebook titles for the library to purchase […] |
OverDrive’s 10 most frequently asked questions
| In 2015, more people will use your OverDrive-powered digital library than ever before. To help you stay on top of growing traffic, we've rounded up answers to ten of our most frequently asked questions:
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New QPU macro assembler
| Since Broadcom released complete documentation for the VideoCore IV GPU back in February 2014 we’ve seen a number of fun uses of our 24GFLOPs of QPU compute, from Andrew Holme’s FFT library to Pete Warden’s deep learning experiments. It’s not unusual to see a 10x increase in performance over the ARM for algorithms with a decent amount of parallelism. A platform is only as good as its development tools, so it’s a great start to the New Year to see a new QPU macro assembler from Marcel Müller. This builds on Pete and Eman’s earlier QPU assemblers to include support for macros and functions. Along the way, he’s even managed to squeeze another few percent out of the size and run time of Andrew’s FFT library. You can find source, binaries, documentation and sample code here. |