E Books

Maybe you left someone off of your list. Maybe you like to live on the edge. Maybe you enjoy the sound that shipping deadlines make as they fly by. Whatever the reason, if you're looking for last-minute gifts, you're not alone. According to a customer survey from Sears, 40 percent of Americans still have Christmas shopping to do. Here are some ideas to lessen the panic for present procrastinators: Last-minute shipping: In some ways, the calendar has favored procrastinating gifters this year by putting Christmas...

NEW YORK — Over the past two years, publishers have been steadily filling one of the largest gaps in the e-book catalogue — poetry. Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes and Wallace Stevens have been among the poets whose work recently became available in electronic format. And Random House Inc., W.W. Norton and several other publishers now routinely release new books in both print and digital versions, including last month's Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, Sharon Olds' "Stag's Leap.

Technology is stalking your bookcase. It has already taken over your photo albums and emptied your film canisters. It overwhelmed your music collection and flooded Goodwill with CD towers. It canceled your newspaper subscription. (Sniff, tear.) And now, digital evangelicals believe technology is on the verge of supplanting those dusty, yellowed tomes that weigh three times more than an iPod and don't even come with any cool free apps. Sales of electronic books jumped 68.4 percent last year and skyrocketed 177 percent to $96.6 million for the...

The Justice Department accused Apple executives, including its late chief executive Steve Jobs, of leading a conspiracy that raised e-book prices in an attempt to hurt Amazon and other competitors, according to documents filed in federal court Tuesday. At one point, Eddy Cue, Apple's lead e-books negotiator, counseled the chief executive of Random House to withhold e-books from Amazon unless it agreed to higher prices, the Justice Department said. Another publisher, Macmillan, would later employ this strategy,...

America's obsession with digital tablets is driving a boon in e-book reading, a new survey shows, a trend that is dampening the appeal of printed books and shaking the centuries-old publishing business. The share of Americans who read e-books grew to 23 percent from 16 percent over the past year while the number of adults who read printed books fell to 67 percent from 72 percent, according to a study released Thursday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The swift and dramatic shift in reading habits was brought on by the rising...

The Justice Department accused Apple executives, including its late chief executive Steve Jobs, of leading a conspiracy that raised e-book prices in an attempt to hurt Amazon and other competitors, according to documents filed in federal court Tuesday. At one point, Eddy Cue, Apple's lead e-books negotiator, counseled the chief executive of Random House to withhold e-books from Amazon unless it agreed to higher prices, the Justice Department said. Another publisher, Macmillan, would later employ...

Regarding the Jan. 15 front-page article " E-reader revolution creates demand libraries can't meet ": I am a frequent Fairfax County library patron and the owner of a Kindle since November. I often get on the waiting lists for both books and e-books. When I obtain an e-book, I must designate upfront how long I want to keep it: seven, 14 or 21 days. So if I designate 21 and finish the book in three days, it is unavailable for lending to another for 18 days. At least, I don't see any way to return it early.

If you think the universe of e-book readers begins with the Kindle 2 and ends with the Kindle DX, think again. That universe is expanding rapidly. We recently completed thorough hands-on testing of seven of the top e-readers available today and came to a surprising conclusion: Our number one choice isn't from Amazon at all; it's the Sony Reader Touch Edition. Sony's $300 reader matches the Kindle 2's screen size and quality but adds a touchscreen and support for free e-books and Adobe ePub, an e-book file format that book publishers and...

The Justice Department on Wednesday accused five of the nation's largest publishing houses and Apple of fixing prices on e-books, forcing consumers to pay tens of millions of dollars more for their favorite titles. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in New York, the government painted a portrait of an industry desperately trying to turn a profit amid rapid changes in technology and aggressive competition from online retailers. In phone conversations, e-mails and dinners at exclusive...

A new development in the Amazon vs. Macmillan fiasco. Amazon just posted an announcement indicating that it will be "capitulating" to Macmillan by selling the publishers' books for their desired prices. Macmillan is trying to price their e-books at $15, while Amazon prices e-books at $9.99. Macmillan's CEO John Sargent said that unless Amazon sets the price of new e-books to $15, the publisher will not distribute new books to Amazon when they are released. On Friday, Amazon...

NEW YORK — Upcoming novels by Sue Grafton, Elizabeth Gilbert and Wally Lamb are among 40 fall and winter releases excerpted in a free e-book. "Buzz Books 2013: Fall/Winter" also previews fiction from Amy Tan and actor James Franco and such nonfiction as a memoir about Johnny Carson by confidant Henry Bushkin and a book about the Beatles' rise by veteran reporter Larry Kane, who frequently interviewed the band in the 1960s. "Buzz Books 2013" was released Monday by Publishers Lunch, an...

Revolutions in the book business make headlines day after day. Two years ago, Borders filed for bankruptcy ; Amazon, the bane of bookstores, has become a formidable publisher, as well; and, among other upheavals, a dispute over financial terms between Barnes & Noble and Simon & Schuster has led the retailer to cut back on orders from the publisher. What does all this mean for the people who work in the industry, from authors to literary agents, publishers and librarians? Style posed that question to several...

Everyone at KidsPost is pretty excited because we have our very own book. The KidsPost series called "My Name Is . . . ," which featured stories about the lives of kids in countries such as Kenya, Egypt, Brazil and England, among many others, has been turned into an e-book (or electronic book). The e-book can be downloaded and read on Kindles, Nooks and iPads. The book, called " Kids Around the World ," is based on the reporting of foreign correspondents from The Washington Post.

I have noticed over the years that every so often magazines (and now blogs) feature beautiful spreads of book-filled rooms, with headlines like "Living With Books" or "The Pages of Our Lives. " Usually the images feature poetic, far-off places where leather volumes fill 15-foot-tall, wood-paneled shelves, or sparse rooms with gauzy curtains have stacks of books on the floor, standing like architectural columns. As a book lover, I find these rooms transporting and inspirational but totally out of touch.

Consumers may someday be able to buy and sell old e-books, apps and songs the same way campus bookstores sell used textbooks — at least if an Amazon patent ever comes to life. The patent, which Amazon filed in 2009 and won on Jan. 29, imagines a digital resale marketplace where users can trade "digital objects" like e-books, songs, videos and apps. According to the patent, these items would live in the user's "personalized data store," presumably in the cloud. Selling...

E-books may finally be catching on with the toughest of customers: kids. A report produced for children's publisher Scholastic finds that 46 percent of kids between the ages of 9 and 17 said they had read an e-book as of 2012, compared to 25 percent in 2010. And around half of those who have not read an e-book say they want to do so. Still, the appeal of traditional books remains. Around 80 percent of kids who read an e-book still read print books, according to the new report.

FRANKFURT -- While paper books still outnumber texts that can be read online or on dedicated readers like the Kindle or eBook, use of the electronic versions is growing. Many publishing firms unveiled electronic editions of their books for the first time this year at the 61st Frankfurt Book Fair. But many publishers, while they are certain that e-books will play a bigger role in their future, say it has yet to be seen just how big the trend will become. De Bezige Bij, or The Busy Bee, a Dutch publishing company based in...

Experts are saying that Apple is likely to emerge victorious from a Department of Justice case regarding price fixing on e-books. Apple was accused of conspiring to fix and raise prices on e-books along with five major publishers. The DOJ has been investigating the issue since last year and officially filed its lawsuit yesterday. The entire filing is included below, and since its filing, sixteen U.S. states have joined the suit. Last year, Apple switched its pricing structure with publishers to an...

Nearly half a century ago, John Dann MacDonald , a successful writer of paperback mysteries little known within the larger reading public, quietly published "The Deep Blue Good-by," the first of what by MacDonald's death in 1986 had turned into a series of 21 novels featuring the cynical yet idealistic freelance salvage operator Travis McGee. The novel was yet another paperback original to which the literati paid no attention, but though no one could have guessed at the time, it marked a momentous change in MacDonald's career.

America's obsession with digital tablets is driving a boon in e-book reading, a new survey shows, a trend that is dampening the appeal of printed books and shaking the centuries-old publishing business. The share of Americans who read e-books grew to 23 percent from 16 percent over the past year while the number of adults who read printed books fell to 67 percent from 72 percent, according to a study released Thursday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The swift and dramatic shift in reading habits was brought...