By Dianna Dilworth on July 18, 2011 12:30 PM Japan really does seem to have a vending machine for everything. Toys, umbrellas, flowers and neckties can all be purchased in vending machines in Japan. And now you may even be able to buy eBooks in a vending machine one day.

By Jason Boog on July 21, 2011 3:27 PM According to Association of American Publishers (AAP) sales figures for the first half of 2011, eBook sales were up 160 percent compared to the same period last year. At the same time, both paperback and hardcover sales have sagged.

The New York Times added 281,000 digital subscribers in its most recent quarter - enough to keep its overall circulation revenues flat, but not enough to offset a drop in advertising.

It's been six years since Amazon acquired CreateSpace, an on-demand publishing platform, and almost four years since they announced the free online setup for self-publishing. While four years seems like a long time in our fast-paced world, self-publishing still hasn't reached the mass audience. Even the biggest social media gurus still take the traditional route, only choosing to self-publish when they've been rejected by mainstream publishing houses.

Name: BookLamp Quick Pitch: A book recommendation engine built on book content and writing style instead of sales data. Genius Idea: Making it easier to discover good books that haven't neared the best seller list yet.

A month or so before back-to-school season begins in earnest, Amazon has jumped into the lucrative college textbook market with Kindle Textbook Rental.

FOR decades, even after it was renamed and relocated from its original home at Radcliffe, the Columbia Publishing Course seemed unchanging, a genteel summer tradition in the book business, a white-glove six-week course in which ambitious college graduates were educated in the time-honored basics of book editing, sales, cover design and publicity. Not this summer.

"The Sony Reader, priced from $180 to $300, will probably be offered with hardware and software improvements in August, Phil Lubell, vice president of digital reading at Sony Electronics, said yesterday in an interview in San Francisco."

The Boy Who Lived also helped breathe new life into the struggling publishing industry. Even before Harry Potter became one of the most successful movie heroes of all time, the Potter books were turning countless people into readers. But that's not all they did.

Now you can get badges for reading Google News. The company is offering a variety of 500 different emblems, each one for a particular topic. As you become more well-read, you'll get a star added to the badge for that topic. There are five different levels of the stars, starting with a bronze star, and as you read more articles you receive a silver, gold, platinum and the coveted blue ultimate star.

Amazon's rumored tablet computer will be introduced before October, according to a report. The tablet, which would vie with Apple's iPad 2, among other products, will be one of three new hardware products from Amazon coming in the third quarter, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Barnes and Noble offers plenty of newspaper subscriptions for the Nook to fine publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times, but if you are looking for a way to turn your Nook into a news reader for free, here's how.

By Jason Boog on July 12, 2011 6:00 PM The next time you feel depressed about the future of authors, bookstores or publishing, watch the video embedded above from Half Price Books-How To Build a (New) Bookstore. The time-lapse video shows the construction of a bookstore from empty warehouse to the customer-ready store.

By Matthew Fleischer on July 12, 2011 1:14 PM Newspapers are increasingly staking their claim to the Internet and its emerging advertising bounty. According to a recent comScore study for the Newspaper Association of America, newspapers attracted an average monthly audience of 110.8 million unique visitors over the age of 18 to their websites in the second quarter-that's 64.6 percent of all adult Internet users.

Kids and teens who love to write can publish Nook Color books. On June 12, 2011, Barnes and Noble offered information about their Real Books by Real Kids. On July 12, 2011, Barnes and Noble announced a new way for kids and teen authors to create color ebooks.

By Jason Boog on July 11, 2011 4:47 PM Could Google+ end the unhappy practice of the author email blast? We hope so… The 21st Century book release always includes an email blast directed at every friend, relative, acquaintance or journalist that the author knows.

Eager to hop on the tablet trend, the publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News plans to sell discounted Android tablets with preloaded content. The announcement, first reported in Adweek, will cost the publisher - Philadelphia Media Network (PMN) - somewhere in the six figures.

Google will make inroads into the ereader market next week when the first such device using the Google eBooks platform will go on sale at Target. The iriver Story HD will retail for $139.99 - the same price as the Kindle and the Nook Simple Touch Reader - at the chain July 17, according to a blog post from Google.

Prolific novelist James Patterson has raised the stakes on what it means to be a modern-day publisher, again, and this time he is doing it for one of his passions - getting children to read.

Having a virtual book club has never been easier thanks to new tools from Facebook, Skype and Google. Today Facebook announced new updates that make it easier to chat with multiple people and to hold one-on-one video calls.