| Booksellers have the wittiest signage in order to capture peoples attention or just to standout in the crowd. All over Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom you are likely to run into one. Today, we are going to take a look at the top 10 best bookstore signs.
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Monday, September 14, 2015
Top 10 Best Bookseller Signs
How to get Send to Kindle Working on Windows 10
| Send to Kindle is a popular document management tool to send e-books, PDF files and other content from your computer to your e-reader. When Windows 10 came out a few months ago, it prevented this software from working correctly. Today, you will learn how to get this program working on Windows 10 computers and tablets. To make “SendToKindle” work in Windows 10, goto “C:\Program Files (x86)\Amazon\SendToKindle” in the file explorer. Right click on SendToKindle.exe and select the properties option. Then Hit the compatibility tab, then hit run compatibility trouble shooter, it’ll do some magic, then hit save these settings. Now try to send your document, it should work now! |
How do you determine how much an e-book should cost?
| Authors who elect to self-publish through Kindle Direct Publishing or Nook Press often have trouble deciding how much their e-book should cost. Major publishers have dramatically increased the prices in the last calendar year from $9.99 to $14.99. If you are going to be submitting your book to sell online, how much should it cost? One of the biggest advantages that self-published authors have is being able to determine their own price. Major publishers on the other hand dictate the price, and the original author doesn’t have any control. Amazon offered some pricing advice to authors, when they were battling Hachette over a contract dispute. The Amazon Books Team posted on the Kindle Forum saying”For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000.” Meanwhile, Mark Coker the CEO of Smashwords knows a thing or two about self-publishing. He wrote in a blog post a few years ago “we found $2.99 books, on average, netted the authors more earnings (profit per unit, multiplied by units sold) than books priced at $6.99 and above. When we look at the $2.99 price point compared to $9.99, $2.99 earns the author slightly more, yet gains the author about four times as many readers. $2.99 e-books earned the authors six times as many readers than books priced over $10.” Mark went on to mention “If an author can earn the same or greater income selling lower cost books, yet reach significantly more readers, then, drum roll please, it means the authors who are selling higher priced books through traditional publishers are at an extreme disadvantage to indie authors in terms of long term platform building. The lower-priced books are building author brand faster. Never mind that an indie author earns more per $2.99 unit sold ($1.80-$2.10) than a traditionally published author earns at $9.99 ($1.25-$1.75).” So, we have some very compelling data from the big companies that are involved in self-publishing, in one way or another, but what are authors saying about e-book pricing? Patrick E. McLean, author of How to Succeed in Evil, wrote that increasing the price of his book increased his even more modest income. That said, his sales were tiny and the original price was just shy of free. So low, in fact, that readers might have seen it as indicating low quality. He said “All we can know it what happened with that one book for that one period. So here's what happened when I raised the price of How to Succeed in Evil from $0.99 to $2.99—Sales went up. I was averaging about nine copies a day. Now I'm up to 17. It's crazy to think that an increase in price causes and increase in sales. I think if I had left the price at 99 cents I would now also be at 14 e-books a day. I don't think price matters that much.” Meanwhile , Russell Blake, said that shifting his prices didn't really move sales very much, but he didn't substantiate it with any specifics. John Keliher, a writer of books about math, said he saw a signficant uptick in his admittedly modest overall sales by lowering prices, enough that he made an extra $100 per month with lower prices. He wrote, "At $5.00 I sell about 50 e-books a month, but at $2.99 I sell about 120 e-books a month. Consequently, my profit is greater when I price my e-books at $2.99." In the end, major publishers are screwing readers over high e-book pricing and the ball is in the indie authors court to be able to demonstrate that they can prove to the big trade houses that they know more about cost than they do. |
Microsoft to Announce Surface 4 at October 4th Event
| Microsoft has just announced that they are having a press event on October 4th, where they are expected to announce the Surface 4 tablet. It seems very likely that it will be powered by an Intel 6th-gen Core "Skylake" processor and run Windows 10. Microsoft made it quite clear that their future Surface tablet is being catered to note taking rather than sketching, this is evident when they moved from Wacom to N-Trig. Microsoft further drove the point home with purchasing N-Trigs stylus technology earlier this year. |
OverDrive and Pearson bring digital textbooks to Napa Valley Unified School District students
| Students at Napa Valley Unified School District’s (NVUSD) high schools in Napa and American Canyon, California, will be able to access their math textbooks digitally using iPads, Chromebooks or other devices, beginning this month for the 2015-2016 school year. Thanks to a new partnership with OverDrive, the leading eBook and audiobook platform for schools, and Pearson textbooks, NVUSD students in grades 9-11 can access and use their Pearson CME textbooks from the same OverDrive platform that currently supports assigned novels, leisure reading, and other content from many top publishers. "Students and teachers have already benefited from OverDrive's streamlined access to resources for curriculum needs and we are looking forward to expanding our available resources to textbooks in a digital format," said Kate MacMillan, Coordinator, Library and Digital Services for Napa Valley Unified School District. As an early adopter of the OverDrive K-12 platform, NVUSD has been meeting students' and educators' needs with a custom combination of digital content for over two years. NVUSD staff selected digital books from millions of titles and thousands of publishers, which aligned with units of study and were compatible with all major devices, including the many Chromebooks purchased by the District. You can see the full story in the press release here.  |
The books the cats of OverDrive recommend
| Here at OverDrive, we love our literary pets! We asked our cats which books they think everyone should read and got some very fun and amusing responses…
Salem lives with Valentine Volk (Consortium Consultant) and recommends One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Goose lives with Sean Kase (IT Technician) and recommends No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal.
Lady PawPaw lives with Meghan Volchko (Collection Development Specialist). She is not a Bad Kitty, but she does love the holidays!
Clover lives with Sydney Kalnay (Training Specialist) and recommends Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.
Maple lives with Karlee Reader (School Launch Specialist) and recommends To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Joan Jett lives with Liz Tousey (Collection Development Analyst) and recommends The Importance of Music to Girls by Lavinia Greenlaw.
Gatsby lives with Christine Bober *Metadata Specialist) and recommends The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Mooy lives with Katie Blachman (Launch Specialist) and recommends Autobiography by Morrissey.
Toaster lives with Kenny Cruse (Metadata Specialist) and recommends Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.
Kiki lives with Shannon Hunt (Training Manager) and recommends Charlotte's Web by E.B. White.
Belle lives with Marla Levine (Collection Development Specialist) and she recommends Yoga for Dummies.
Click here to view all of these titles, as well as some of our other favorite 'Cat Reads' in Marketplace! *Title availability may vary by platform and geographic location*  |
Cube solver
| A quick survey of the desks at Pi Towers reveals thirteen Rubik’s Cubes in various states of done-ness. Gordon’s brain doesn’t work without a cube to play with, and Ben appears to breed them in his desk drawers. (Rubik’s cubes are not the worst thing that breeds in Ben’s drawers.) With this Cube Solver from Maxim Tsoy and Wilbert Swinkels, we finally have a way to completely replace both Gordon and Ben with robots. The Cube Solver uses a Compute Module to run the cube solving algorithms and move the grips and motors; you can find full details of the build and all the code you need at Maxim’s blog if you ever feel the need to replace the cuber in your life with a more compact solution. The post Cube solver appeared first on Raspberry Pi. |
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