Top Stories of Summer 2010

In a press conference on September 1st, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that iTunes users had downloaded 35 million books on iTunes.

Tech blog GDGT quoted Jobs as saying: “People have downloaded over 11.7 billion songs from iTunes, and we’re just about to cross 12b. Over 450 million TV episodes, 100 million movies, 35 million books, and over 160 million accounts with credit cards and 1-click shopping in 23 countries.”

Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2010 series. For those literary folks who spent the summer on their yachts or at their summerhouses, we are rounding up the 15 most popular eBook stories of the season.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Today online writing community Smashwords announced that they had published 20,000 eBooks. In honor of the growing online writers, we are highlighting our Best Online Fiction Writers list as part of our Top Stories of Summer series.

Last week we began chronicling the top 15 stories in eBook news from the summer, to catch up all of our readers returning from summer homes and Caribbean yacht trips. One such story was the launch of our Best Online Fiction Writers list.

We’ve asked community leaders from online writing sites to offer hand-picked recommendations from their communities for our Digital Writer Spotlight column. And we are using this info to feature writers on this page, building a directory of the Best Online Fiction Writers. This constantly updated list will be your guide to the crowded, but inspiring, world of socially networked writing communities. If you want to nominate a writing community, email eBookNewser with your recommendation.

Here are a few of the featured authors:

Marc Aucoin: “a 31-year-old writer from Vancouver, BC, Canada. What do I write? Poetry, short stories, children’s books, and I now have first drafts finished for two novels.”

Danae Ayusso: “I’m a new author that started in January of 2009 and has written over a million words since starting.”

Greg Bennett: “The tools that a mathematician creates to look at the world around themselves can be applied to writing too. You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true.”

Pia Ehrhardt: “I’m a fiction writer, a contributing editor to Narrative Magazine, and a court watcher down at Tulane and Broad.”

Abigail Gibbs: “I’m a fifteen year old blonde-vegetarian-emo-music-junkie with a posh English accent who loves to write.”

Tricia Heighway: “[She] gave up a long and successful nursing career in July 2008 following a neck injury which left her with permanent nerve damage in her right hand. She decided to try and be a full time writer instead.

Scott Kelly: “Writing is my entire purpose in life and the only measure by which I judge my self-worth. I have a B.A. in literature and love to critique artist’s work.”

With all of the new tablets coming out this fall touting their fancy eReading abilities, one wonders if we’ll see more ridiculous lawsuits against them since they are not just like books.

Apple is facing a class action lawsuit in California that came on earlier this summer, from consumers who feels that Apple’s claim that “reading on the iPad is just like reading a book,” is false. It was filed in July claiming that because the iPad overheats after prolonged use and its poor visibility in sunlight prevent it from living up to Apple’s marketing promise.

Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2010 series. For all our readers returning from summer homes and Caribbean yacht trips, we’ve created a short list of the 15 stories you may have missed during this long busy summer for the eBook industry.

Here is more about the Apple lawsuit from the complaint: “Indeed, according to the www.apple.com website, ‘[r]eading on iPad is just like reading a book.’ However, contrary to this promise, using the iPad is not ‘just like reading a book’ at all since books do not close when the reader is enjoying them in the sunlight or in other normal environmental environments. This promise, like other portions of APPLE’s marketing material for the iPad, is false.”

There are many ideas floating around about how to price eBooks, and bundling could be one of them.

This summer Gizmodo profiled Christian Owens, a 16-year-old millionaire who made his fortune by bundling Mac applications–a model that eBook publishers could follow.

The UK teenager build a business around a simple service, the Mac Bundle Box. He convinced developers to sell multiple applications at a significant discount in a special bundle. Gizmodo explained: “The resulting bundle had a combined retail value of around $400, but he would sell it for a tenth of that price. Not only that: If enough people bought the package, a new application would get unlocked for all buyers, which guaranteed very good word-of-mouth promotion. ”

Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2010 series. For all our readers returning from summer homes and Caribbean yacht trips, we’ve created a short list of the 15 stories you may have missed during this long busy summer for the eBook industry.

Bundling could be an effective model for eBooks as well. Publishers could bundle eBooks into cheaper packages, sorted by genre, author, or imprint. What do you think?

Reading in cafes in California is not as inviting as it once was, for people reading eBooks, that is. Earlier this summer, just as Starbucks began to offer free Wi-Fi, some cafes in California unplugged their Wi-Fi. Wanting to make their cafes more social and to keep traffic moving, some cafes got rid of Wi-Fi all together and put a ban on laptops, iPads and even Kindles in the strictest of cafes.

The LA Times reported: “Cafe owners have tried a variety of tactics to foil Wi-Fi squatters. They put out signs that ask laptop users to share tables or point them to nearby Wi-Fi hot spots such as public libraries. They hand out wireless passwords that expire in an hour. They cover electrical outlets (less effective now that customers come armed with laptops sporting longer battery lives or with spare batteries). Computer bans extend to iPads and even Kindles and other e-readers, although paper books and other reading materials are still embraced.”

Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2010 series. For all our readers returning from summer homes and Caribbean yacht trips, we’ve created a short list of the 15 stories you may have missed during this long busy summer for the eBook industry.

This summer, the eReader price wars began and now they seem to be in full effect. The biggest eReader news of the summer was definitely the launch of the Kindle 3. It seems like ages since we reported the story back in July, but the eReaders only began shipping a couple of weeks ago.

Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2010 series. For all our readers returning from summer homes and Caribbean yacht trips, we’ve created a short list of the 15 stories you may have missed during this long busy summer for the eBook industry.

Though you probably didn’t miss this one even if you were sitting on a beach in the South Pacific all summer, we couldn’t leave this out, as it may have been the biggest story of summer.

After a summer of being sold out, the Kindle is finally listed as “In Stock” on Amazon’s website. Watch out this fall for a sea of eReaders to flood the market.

Today’s free eBook of the Day is back by popular demand. While it is technically not an eBook and more of a document, The Declaration of Independence was our most popular Free eBook of the Day this summer.

You can download the document here.  All Americans should have this one handy.

Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2010 series. For all our readers returning from summer homes and Caribbean yacht trips, we’ve created a short list of the 15 stories you may have missed during this long busy summer for the eBook industry.

Tapulous just keeps tapping them out. Social apps developer Tapulous has a developed a new app for the rock band Linkin Park called the Linkin Park Revenge. It is the latest featured-artist release in the developers Tap Tap Revenge series, joining other music-inspired titles such as Metallica Revenge, Nirvana Revenge and Kings Of Leon Revenge.

Earlier this summer, The Walt Disney Company acquired Tapulous and any day now we expect to see Disney content in one of their apps. Tapulous’s biggest claim to fame is the iPad game, Tap Tap Revenge, a music game that has ben downloaded millions of times. Disney has a number of video games and book versions of its popular franchises including Toy Story, Hannah Montana and Mickey Mouse which would make great apps.

Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2010 series. For all our readers returning from summer homes and Caribbean yacht trips, we’ve created a short list of the 15 stories you may have missed during this long busy summer for the eBook industry.