Princeton University Press to try e-book shorts

Princeton University Press is going to begin publishing e-book shorts on Amazon and other e-book sellers, testing the idea that an academic publisher can succeed where other e-book publishers have gone with Kindle Singles.

Kindle Singles are sold in Amazon’s Kindle store. Generally longer than a newspaper article and shorter than a complete book, Kindle singles are sometimes short stories, sometimes long nonfiction pieces. Priced from 99 cents to $2.99, Kindle Singles allow someone to dip into a topic without making a huge financial commitment. Kindle Singles are available on Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, of course. They’re also available to anyone who has installed the Kindle app on a smartphone, or uses the Kindle cloud reader online.

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Will Amazon’s Lending Library Help or Hurt Novelists and Book Publishers?

Early this morning, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced its first venture in the world of e-book rentals: the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

Designed exclusively for Amazon Prime subscribers who own a Kindle (sorry, iPad users – the Kindle App alone will not suffice), the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library allows consumers to borrow one book per month without any due dates. Amazon can only offer this option because the books are digital; the company isn’t loaning consumers much more than a small e-book file, which will be deleted the moment you choose a new book to borrow.

These restrictions – only one book per month, and only one book at a time – is a great way to prevent readers from abusing the system. But it also raises some questions as to what the future of book publishing might look like.

Amazon’s venture into e-books has already made a significant impact on the industry, more so than the reported impact that Steve Jobs made on video games. Many publishers have grown to accept Amazon’s digital strategy. But the Wall Street Journal reports that none of the six largest publishers in the U.S. are participating in Amazon’s latest venture, fearing that it could negatively impact future sales.

New Publishing Models Emerge with e-Book Popularity

Traditional book publishers are getting a challenger and an ally in two very different, well-backed startups that have just launched in the e-book space.

Two companies officially launched last week, both backed by important venture capital players and each one looking in different ways to capitalize on the power and growing popularity of e-books. Hyperink hopes to upend the publishing world by bringing how-to books to the market in a faster, cheaper and more targeted way than traditional publishers. And Subtext, started by a group of veterans from the world of social games, wants to turn e-book reading from a solitary to a social experience.

Thursday saw the debut in beta of Hyperink, based in San Francisco and founded by Kevin Gao and Matt Lee. “Our goal is to become the biggest publisher of e-books,” Gao, the company’s 27-year-old chief executive, told Portfolio.com.

Hands On: The Kobo Vox E-Reader Tablet

Move over, Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Kobo began selling the Kobo Vox e-reader tablet on Friday, and we received some hands-on time with the device.

The $199, 7-inch, Wi-Fi-only Kobo Vox is an Android 2.3 device, and looks it. Once you move past the default home page and apps, and into the Kobo Vox application, the experience becomes much more pleasant

In fact, the fact that the Vox is an Android tablet serves as a rather stark reminder that Kobo’s strength is its application. Holding the $129 Kobo Touch (or the Amazon Kindle, for that matter), a user is guided into a somewhat walled garden where appearances and content are served by the device manufacturer. Indeed, inside the Vox’s social Pulse e-reading application, I didn’t want to leave.

But I also wonder if users who are considering a tablet purchase might want to invest in a competitor, download the free Kobo app, and then buy books from Kobo directly.

According to Matthew Welch, the general manager from Kobo, the Kobo platform has about 5 million users, with about 2.5 million in the United States. Kobo is the dominant platform in Canada and Australia, Welch claimed, and deals the company has signed or is signing with the U.K.’s W.H. Smith bookstore and the French Fnac bookstore/electronics chain should boost the company’s presence in those two markets as well, he said.

HarperCollins Acquires Religion-Book Publisher

HarperCollins Publishers Inc. agreed to acquire Thomas Nelson Inc., significantly bolstering HarperCollins’s offerings of religious-themed titles.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. It comes nearly 18 months after an investor group led by private-equity firm Kohlberg & Co. acquired a majority of Thomas Nelson’s stock. In 2006 the Nashville-based publisher had gone private in a transaction valued at about $473 million.

Calls to Kohlberg weren’t returned. HarperCollins is a unit of News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

HarperCollins already owns a leading religious division, Zondervan, as well as the imprint HarperOne, which is best known for its health, religion/spirituality and self-help titles. Thomas Nelson has issued such best-selling titles as “Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of his Trip to Heaven and Back,” by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent. It also publishes leadership and personal finance works as well as bibles and works used in Christian studies.

Although Thomas Nelson doesn’t report its sales, the publishing house is estimated to generate about $200 million annually in revenue from all publishing categories, according to one industry estimate.

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Steve Martin to publish book of tweets

Tweets posted on Twitter by US comedian Steve Martin are to be released in a book, he has announced.

“Due to absolutely no demand, soon I’m publishing a book of my tweets,” he wrote on his Twitter account.

“Many of your replies included! All my profits to charity.”

The book will be released by Grand Central Publishing in June 2012 with the title: “The Ten, Make that Nine, Habits of Very Organized People. Make that Ten.”

Asked on Twitter why anyone would buy the book when they could just read through his old tweets, he replied: “Because I’ll edit out all the garbage.”

Martin’s recent tweets include, “love to shake hands with the paparazzi when I have a bad cold”, “have just been diagnosed with a borderline personality” and “I thought I should tell you that I am now awake – this is for real fans only”.

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