Publicity

NetGalley, the eGalley service, announced a makeover of its homepage and catalog today. The company has made the homepage a bit sleeker, with a carousel of new available eGalleys, plus links to the “buzz” page and news.

The more important changes are in the catalog, which now can be sorted by recent titles, publisher, or genre using a menu on the left side of the page. Plus ISBNs and genres are now prominently displayed in all catalog listings, which was not the case before.

It’s not earth-shattering stuff, but it’s good news that NetGalley is making itself easier to use. Most of these changes were made in response to user feedback.

Edelweiss, the digital catalog provider owned by Above the Treeline and which debuted at last year’s Book Expo America (BEA) has announced a new partnership with BEA to create “Books@BEA,” a digital catalog of all the books on exhibition at the conference.

In a release, Steve Rosato, Event Director for BEA, said, “We’re thrilled to debut Books@BEA because it’s yet another added value to both attendees and exhibitors and demonstrates BEA’s commitment to keeping pace with the evolution of the industry.”

Participation in the catalog is open to all publishers exhibiting their books at the show, but excludes backlist titles. The catalog will also be free to readers, who will have to register to see it.

This year’s BEA will be held at the Javits Center in New York City on May 25-27, 2010. Publishers interested in participating in Books@BEA can contact Mike Carlucci at mcarlucci@reedexpo.com.

According to a study conducted by researchers at Brigham Young University, giving away free eBooks leads to a short-term increase in sales for the print versions of those books. The study’s authors monitored 41 print books in the 8 weeks before and after the givaways.

According to Wired, here’s what they found: “data showed that giving the books away resulted in higher print sales in the eight weeks following the giveaway than during the same time period preceding it for fiction (a 26 percent increase), non-fiction (5 percent) and Random House releases (9 percent).”

So publishers, start giving away those eBooks! Click here for the full report from the Study.

Read-An-eBook Week officially began yesterday and goes through Friday. A whole bunch of Website and device makers have come together to sponsor a week’s worth of events, features, and free or discounted content.

The coolest part of the Website is the eBookstore, which features links to a whole bunch of online stores–from Smashwords to Kobo–that are offering free or discounted eBooks this week, though don’t expect to see too many trade books discounted.

If you only read eBooks one week this year, make it this one.

You know something’s important when it gets its own week. In fact, this year marks the sixth occurrence of Read-An-eBook-Week, an annual literary event designed to promote eBooks and draw widespread attention to the companies, authors and communities involved with digital publishing. This year, the event will take place March 7-13. The official Website of Read-An-eBook-Week is http://ebookweek.com, where you’ll find resources and information about what’s going on.

In a statement, Rita Toews, founder of week said,”The mission of Read an E-Book Week is to raise international awareness about the benefits of eBooks to authors, readers, educators and the media.”

Smashwords will be one of the main sponsors of Read-An-eBook-Week. Aside from discounts on eBooks, Smashwords will also feature a special eBook-Week catalog on its home page. Here’s more from the Sashwords blog, and we’ll keep you posted as we hear about other details.

eBookNewser wants to point your attention to 5 Chapters, a Website that serializes a short story in five daily parts each week. 5 Chapters is just a Web page, and it doesn’t offer eBook downloads of its content, but we want to show you how you can turn this week’s story into an eBook.

This week’s story is by Sam Lipsyte. It’s called “A New Start,” and it’s an excerpt from his forthcoming novel ‘The Ask.’

So, say you want to read this on your Kindle. One thing you can do it point the Kindle’s crappy web browser to the 5 Chapters site, but you wouldn’t want to do that: it will take you longer to get to the site with the Kindle browser than it will to read the book. You could just cut and paste the text and save it as a word doc, then email it to your Kindle account and have it wirelessly delivered for $.10 or drag and drop it to the Kindle for free. But that takes too long and maybe costs $.10. Our suggestion of to use a service like ReKindleIt, which we reported on way back when, to quickly turn the story into Kindle friendly text and get it on your Kindle.

Here’s an excerpt from our earlier report: “Here’s how it works. Go to the RekindleIT Web site (http://www.rekindle.it). There, you’re guided through a few simple steps to register RekindleIT’s email with your Kindle account and to drag a link to your bookmarks bar. Then, all you do is surf over to any page you want to put on your Kindle, click the link you just dragged, tell the RekindleIT popup window whether you’d like your document wireless Whispersynced to your Kindle (for which Amazon will charge you about $.15) or emailed to you for free (after which you can transfer the file by USB). The whole process takes a matter of seconds.”

So that’s how you read Sam Lipsyte’s new story on your Kindle.

Ever wanted to read Candide, Voltaire’s immortal satire, but didn’t want to do it without the help of a carefully planned, multimedia online platform? Well, now you can, thanks to the New York Public Library, which has just launched On the Road with Candide, an online exhibition celebrating the 250th birthday of Voltaire’s classic book.

On the Road with Candide is an online companion to the Library’s in-house exhibition, Candide at 250, though the NYPL also seems to view it as very much its own thing, intended to reach a wider audience than could actually make it to the library on 42nd street.

Here’s how the Library introduces the exhibition: “On the Road with Candide showcases groundbreaking new kinds of digital content. NYPL’s latest digital exhibition uses the on-site exhibition Candide at 250: Scandal and Success as a jumping-off point for a unique online journey … inviting the involvement of various communities, including students, scholars, artists, and more. Check out a new kind of pick-and-choose visual storytelling, plus a ‘Candide Journey’ project created in Google Maps by Brooklyn 10th graders. One of the first journeys you can choose takes you through the great American illustrator Rockwell Kent’s edition of Candide from 1928 (the first book published under the Random House imprint). Galleries of work by other notable artists will follow shortly.”

It’s actually pretty cool–especially the Kent drawings, which are used in various ways throughout the site.

eBooks really must be catching on if the glossy fashion mags are covering conferences about them. Vanity Fair concludes its writeup of MediaBistro’s eBook Summit by asking, “Whoever said digital publishing was boring?” Thankfully, not Vanity Fair.

Lauren Sozio, VF’s blogger, indeed understood what was going on at the conference: “This forum wasn’t about the new devices being heralded as saviors of the print industry, because, if we’ve learned anything about new technology, broad cultural change doesn’t depend simply on a new gadget. Rather, it is the social use of the gadget that determines its longevity.”

Though whoever was responsible for the image at the top of the piece should have known better than to depict the Kindle 1 along with the Nook, iPhone and Sony Reader. What is this, 2008?

Did you miss last week’s eBook Summit? Or were you there and want to know what others have to say about it? Well, MediaBistro has just posted a roundup of press coverage from the event.

Here are some details from our sibling blog, GalleyCat: “PaidContent led the charge, writing about the summit debate over advertising in eBooks , Sony’s e-reading strategy, and Google Books’ plans for 2010.

“In addition, Publishers Weekly and The Bookseller both wrote about the passionate debate over Amazon’s $9.99 eBook pricing model–led by Books on Board founder and CEO Bob Livolsi.”

Check out the full roundup here, and click here for some photos.

NetGalley has added a “buzz” page to its site in an effort to boost awareness of their service and to connect to the larger book reviewing world. The page shows recent titles available on NetGally, the most ambitious service offering electronic galleys, and links to recent reviews of those titles alongside a button to request an eGalley of the title.

Fran Toolan, Chief Igniter of Firebrand, the company behind NetGalley, told eBookNewser that, “the idea and execution of the the ‘Buzz’ page on NetGalley is all credited to Lindsey Rudnickas, our ‘digital concierge.’ Lindsey was looking for a mechanism to inform the professional review community of other publicity and events where particular titles on NetGalley are being promoted. The concept behind the page is a recognition that book marketing is an evolutionary process that may start with distributing galleys for review, but quickly move on to a variety of creative methods for publicizing a book.”

“Right now,” said Toolan, “this is a very manual process,” meaning Rudnickas tracks the coverage of popular NetGalley titles and updates the Web site. You can follow NetGalley on twitter at @NetGalley and see updates about buzz titles using the hashtag #NGpick.