eBookstores

A new ebookstore had its grand opening this past week, and it’s a welcome sight. Jewish-e-books.com, which opened in 2010, is going to focus pretty tightly on just a couple niches in the book market.

It currently stocks books that reflect the Jewish culture as well as an extensive selection of title in the Hebrew language. Jewish-e-books.com very likely has the best Hebrew collection of any Ebookstore.

The eBooks do have DRM, unfortunately, but on the upside Jewish-e-books.com only sells eBooks in Epub, and that means it can work with most reading apps and eReaders (Kindle and iBooks excepted, of course). The site also recommends that you use Bluefire Reader, the iOS reading app, and it offers trouble shooting tips on how to get it to work.

The store’s founder, Yossi Levy, is also planning to expand the store to provide eReaders and accessories. “Our customers are savvy,” he says. “They want a one-stop shopping experience; we’ll give it to them: competitively priced Jewish E-Books, the latest devices, and everything they need to build their Jewish digital library.”

Personally, I’m hoping that he also decides to offer a conversion service. I’m sure any number of people would find a Hebrew-as-a-second-language conversion service useful.

The Melbourne-based indie bookseller Books for Cooks has recently announced that it it’s signed up to sell eBooks, but it’s not working with who you might expect. It’s signed with Inventive Labs, the developers of Booki.sh, a cloud based reading platform.

Why Booki.sh? Well, it was natively developed and supported  in Australia.  But co-owner Tim White stated that he wasn’t satisfied with the limitations of the existing formats. “We don’t believe current ebook formats suit traditional image-rich beautifully designed books or are necessarily practical for kitchen use,” said White, “but we do believe that no one particular format–physical or ebook–is the only format for all readers or all books.”

Booki.sh is unique among the commercial eBook platforms as being the only one that is entirely cloud based. It requires no app, and the eBooks bought through it cannot be downloaded.

Books for Cooks also expects to have the cookbooks it publishes as Murdock Books available through Booki.sh this fall, and its eBookstore should be opening in about a month.

via

Vook, maker of enhanced eBooks, has released a nifty whitepaper on what it has learned about pricing in the not quite 2 years since it launched. You can download it as a PDF, and it’s well worth your time to read.

It turns out there’s more variables to ebook pricing than you might think. The best selling point for a title is dependent on (among other things) genre, category, ebookstore, and format. Some stores do better at different prices, and there’s really no explanation than it’s a quirk of the store. Some formats or genre also can have an interesting affect on sales.

Vook came up with 10 golden rules to explain some of the things it saw:

1. Zero variable cost means it’s OK to significantly lower prices to maximize revenue.
2. Optimal pricing is highly content specific.
3. Certain pricing thresholds trigger psychological “automatic” purchases.
4. Categorization has a large role in optimal pricing and discoverability.
5. Merchandising whole catalogs is more effective than single titles: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

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Today marks the official opening of  the Planet 9 eBookstore and reading apps. This is a niche eBook provider, and it will focus on the Croatian market. It belongs to Hrvatski Telekom, the national telecommunications company for Croatia.

The Planet 9 reading apps are currently available for both iOS and Android. The interface for the Android app is in Croatian, which suggests that Hrvatski Telekom only plans to focus on the Croatian market. Considering that it is the notional phone company that would make some sense.

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Bookeen have been selling eBooks on the Book Orizon eBook reader for some time now, and today it launched a website where everyone could buy eBooks.

The Bookeen Store has the same content as the eBookstore on the Orizon, obviously, and it sells eBooks in Epub and PDF. These eBooks are compatible with  most eBook readers, reading apps, and basically everything but the Kindle and iBooks.

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Amazon brought its Italian Kindle Store one step closer to reality today. The Mondadori Group, a conglomeration of Italian publishing houses, will soon be offering its eBooks in the Kindle Store.

According to the press release, the Mondadori, Einaudi, Sperling&Kupfer and Piemme publishing houses are prepared to offer upwards of 2 thousand new eBooks to be sold in the US, UK, and German Kindle Stores. The selection is expected to expand by another thousand titles by the end of the year.

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Inferno Solutions, an Indian tech company, has just launched an eBookstore.While it is focused on the Indian market, Ebooksyours will sell to anyone around the globe.

But I’m not sure why you’d want to shop there. This eBookstore originally merited a post as a polite mention, but the limited selection almost killed the post. This isn’t a normal eBookstore, where you’d find titles from most of the major publishers. Instead, Ebooksyours seems to only have a few dozen titles, and none are from any well-known name.

The prices are okay ($3 to $5), but the fact that they prefer payment through PayPal gives me pause. There’s just somethng off about this site.

Ebooksyours.com

Gollancz, the SF & Fantasy imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, will be launching a new SF-focused ebook website this fall.

The SF Gateway will call upon Gollancz’s impressive backlist of SF&F titles, and its goal is to make thousands of out-of-print titles by classic genre authors available as eBooks. The site launches this fall with around 1 thousand titles, and the collection should grow to more than 3,000 by the end of next year.

It will be an ebookstore, but the SF Gateway is also going to be integrated with the new online edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which will also launch later this year. Gollancz also plans to make the SF Gateway into a social network for SF readers as well as a major community hub where they can interest with fellow fans. The site will likely include forums, blogs, regular sales promotions and contests, and Gollancz hopes that it will become the natural home on the net for anyone with an interest in classic SFF.

via SF Gateway

The German app developer txtr released a new version of its Android app today.

Txtr 4.0 brings new stability, behind the scene tweaks, and a new user interface. Users can now use the new app take notes in their eBooks, which the app will syn across all txtr apps and the user’s account on the txtr website. Txtr was also pleased to announced that its ebookstore now has over 50 thousand German language titles. It’s not as much as Kobo, but it’s still more than the German Kindle Store.

Txtr was last in the news a couple months ago, when I revealed that it had been bought by 3M, the multinational manufacturing company.  3M invested in txtr as part of the 3M Cloud Library, a new digital library platform.

Android Market

Kobo has just added another payment option to its ebookstore. Along with Visa, Mastercard, your immortal soul, or Gift Cards, Kobo now accepts Paypal, the payment processor of last resort.

Kobo customers can now buy any of 2.4 million eBooks sold by Kobo and pay with their existing Paypal account. This does away with the need to give Paypal your credit card info.

PayPal currently operates in more than 190 markets and it has more than 87 million active users. It lets customers send, receive, and hold funds in 24 currencies worldwide.

Kobo is only the latest eBookstore to make it easier to shop online. Fictionwise has accepted Paypal since before 2008, and Barnes & Noble has accepted it for nearly that long.