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Amazon started life as a book retailer, and as a book retailer they made books cheaper. Then they were pioneers in the e-book industry where they made books cheaper. Their recently announced plan to give readers free e-book copies of books they buy in physical form doesn't make books cheaper per se, but it does give readers greater value for their book-buying dollar. This is all great stuff. But not everyone agrees. Emily Gould complains that "When ebooks and pbooks are bundled, the ebooks are sold at a loss. That's authors', publishers' and, associatively, non-AMZN retailers' loss" and "frustrating we have to keep explaining that ebook production is not free. digital objects are not made by elves."

In 2007 the JISC national e-books observatory project was set up to undertake market research to help e-book publishers, aggregators, libraries and funding bodies understand the behaviours of e-book users and to assess the impact of free at-the-point of use course text e-books on traditional print sales to students

Though e-books are rising in popularity, print remains the foundation of Americans' reading habits. Most people who read e-books also read print books, and just 4% of readers are "e-book only." Audiobook listeners have the most diverse reading habits overall, while fewer print readers consume books in other formats.

Borders joins the e-book revolution with a new e-reader and e-book site created with a Canadian partner. The bookstore chain is entering a market crowded with other e-reading devices.

This is an article that gives some insight on why e-books are gaining popularity and why we should be reading more e-publications.

Not that we all don't know what an e-book is (scary thought if we are in this program and don't!), but I just thought it was interesting that HP Learning Center is offering a class about e-books. Seems with the rising popularity of the Kindle, every has something to say about e-books.

Google aims to make reading an e-book better than reading a print book for all types of books. 

Google aims to make reading an e-book better than reading a print book for all types of books. 

The company had hoped to have the e-book reader available in its highest-volume stores this week, but online demand is outstripping supply. "> <!-- script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://i.cmpnet.com/informationweek/js/tab.js">&lt;/script --> <!-- <script src='http://i.cmpnet.com/ads/graphics/as5/redirect/tw_mcafee_081021.js'>&lt;/script> --> http://www.informationweek.com/rss/all_st

Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions - deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.

E-books competing with paperbacks.

Speaking of reading an e-book, our text book for this class is apparently on Google Book Search. Maybe some of you knew that already, but I sure didn't! I like that this page also gives a list of other similar books.

As e-books go mainstream, authors are gaining an opportunity to literally rewrite history. Eagle-eyed owners of the Amazon Kindle e-reader, like Paul Biba of the site TeleRead, have taken note of messages from Amazon letting them know that an e-book they had purchased "contained some errors that have been corrected."

Simon & Schuster plans to postpone the release of 35 e-book titles by four months. This is in part attributed to the sales of Stephen King's "Under the Dome" in which the publisher noticed that e-book sales were cannibalizing hardcover sales.

More coverage of Amazon's decision to make Kindle e-books available through public libraries.

Nick Carr (of "The Shallows") is skeptical of the Kindle Fire's new "X-Ray" feature. He writes, "A person of the web may see X-Ray as a glorious advance. A person of the book may see the technology as a catastrophe."

Nicholas Carr, author of "The Shallows", raises another alarm about enhanced reading tools for e-books, but what doesn't like may be just what others find most compelling about e-books.

Excellent read from  book designer "I want to look at where printed books stand in respect to digital publishing, why we historically haven't read long-form text on screens and how the iPad is wedging itself in the middle of everything. In doing so I think we can find the line in the sand to define when content should be printed or digitized. This is a conversation for books-makers, web-heads, content-creators, authors and designers. For people who love beautifully made things. And for the storytellers who are willing to take risks and want to consider the most appropriate shape and media for their yarns."

Interesting report on adopting e-textbooks.  Important to remember how early we are in the development of e-readers and that we have few texts developed explicitly for e-readers.

Great piece on the cost of e-books and the dangers posed by Amazon.

A classic cookbook becomes an e-book after working though a number of technical problems.