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"Amazon has a 78% market share of Hachette Livre e-book titles in the UK and a 60% share in the US, an Investor Day presentation by Hachette Livre has revealed. [...] The report said that 60% of digital sales of Hachette titles are through Amazon in the US, followed by Barnes & Noble with a 19% share and Apple iBooks with a 13% share, while "others" including Kobo and Google share 8% of the pie."

"La Quadrature du Net s'était farouchement opposée à l'ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). A la suite du rejet de ce traité par le Parlement européen en juillet, elle a publié une plateforme de propositions pour la réforme du droit d'auteur, élaborée par Philippe Aigrain. Co-fondateur de La Quadrature du Net, Philippe Aigrain plaide pour un nouveau modèle de financement des biens culturels et la reconnaissance d'un droit au partage non marchand ; il a publié en février Sharing : Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age. Deux bibliothécaires, Lionel Maurel et Silvère Mercier, ont contribué à cette nouvelle plateforme en rédigeant un passage sur la défense de la liberté des usages collectifs non marchands - notamment dans les bibliothèques. Dans un billet relayé sur Owni, Lionel Maurel présente ce travail et invite les bibliothécaires à défendre leurs exigences en matière de partage de la culture, au moment où le gouvernement entame une consultation sur l'acte II de l'exception culturelle."

"Lulu was founded on the philosophy of breaking down barriers that prevent talented authors from sharing their knowledge and telling their stories. Our goal is to help authors reach the broadest possible audience by providing tools to create, publish, market and sell their remarkable work. In an ongoing commitment to our founding philosophy, we continue to remove barriers when we see them, which brings us to the subject of Digital Rights Management (DRM)… Effective January 15, 2013, Lulu will no longer offer Adobe's Digital Editions DRM as an option when publishing or revising eBook content in EPUB and PDF formats."

"Digital Rights Management (DRM) is any technological constraint on what a user can do with a document. Usually, DRM involves some kind of encryption that locks a document to a user's identity, so that they can't share it with anyone else. Whether you choose to use DRM on your ebooks is up to you, and should depend on your sales and distribution strategy for each book or list of books. At Electric Book Works we always recommend not using DRM; but we know not everyone agrees with us. The question you should ask yourself is not 'Shall we go DRM-free' or 'What DRM should we use', but 'Do we need DRM on this?' That said, if you do choose to use DRM, at some point you'll have to choose DRM settings for an Adobe Content Server. Read on for guidance."

"L'organisation mondiale au service des bibliothèques recommande à ses membres de privilégier la licence OCD-BY dans le cadre de leurs projets de mise en ligne de leurs bases de données. Celle-ci leur servira sous certaines conditions au partage ainsi qu'à la copie, à la distribution, la modification ou encore la transformation des catalogues de fichiers concernés. La licence Open Data, de type share alike, offre la possibilité à ses utilisateurs de partager des données dans le respect des normes communautaires définies par le « WorldCat Rights and Responsabilities ». WorldCat, bibliographie sur le web propre à l'OCLC, est réputée comme le plus grand registre accessible en ligne. Depuis sa création en 1971, le catalogue mondial a su attirer les bases de données relatives à des dizaines de milliers d'institutions publiques et privées à travers de nombreux pays."

"For two years, the Readmill community has been writing in the margins of ebooks. You've created hundreds of thousands of highlights and comments and shared them across the web, making new connections each day through the books you read."

"Since we introduced Readmill for Android in October, highlighting has been our most requested feature. It's one of the best ways to connect with other readers in the community, and we couldn't wait to share it with you today."

"Founded in late 2010 by Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud, Readmill launched as a social layer for eBooks, making it easy to highlight extracts that can be shared with friends and peers, turning the book into a "social object". It offers a very elegant reading app for Android and iPhone, as well as a tablet version for iPad. The app also employs a Twitter-like follow model where users can follow books, other users and, crucially, authors."

"Don't you think it is more crucial to make the web ready for books, than to make books ready for the web ? To make the web ready for books will improve it. To try to make books perfectly ready for the web will make them run the risk of losing what makes them books. The real challenge is to keep the best of both worlds, not to merge them. And if new forms are invented, new kind of ways of sharing thoughts - and it's already the case : that's perfect."

"One of the best things about the internet is that it makes everything available. The down side of that is how you navigate 'everything' to find what's really good and will resonate with you. This is a real issue when it comes to finding books and explains why we rely so much on the recommendations of people whose opinions we know and trust. The internet may be changing publishing but the way we choose the books we read still relies on that same principle. Of course lots of websites now give you the chance to read reviews of books that other people have read but unless you know more about the individual reviewer and their own perspective there's a limit to how valuable their opinion, whether positive or critical, will be. There is a way of making everyone's opinion resonate with you no matter how their tastes and backgrounds might differ from yours however, and that's if they were only allowed to recommend their very favourite books to you and explain in each case why that book matters so much to them. There's no guarantee that you will share their passion for any one particular book but that personal insight will give you the context for that opinion and it may be enough to persuade you to give that book a try."

"Read is a free iOS app to read EPUB that really helps pro-readers remember more from their readings. Read is our new app to better understand how mobile reading should feel. Our previous iterations, Addr, an iPad app, uses collective annotations as an alternative reading workflow. Libr, a side-project, works like a P2P network and enables readers to share their ebooks within the app. The startup has its roots in Thomas' research on e-reading. His expertise drives our startup on a daily basis. Today, we think ourselves as a studio iterating around one core question: how to read on a screen? We somehow believed in "mobile first" before reading Ben Evans' blog. Our job is to foresee what readers will look for when reading on a pocket computer in the near future."

"Wattpad rolled out an update for its Android app yesterday which adds new options for audio soundtracks. The app lets creators embed clips from Soundcloud in their stories, and it also lets authors record their own clips. The new features lets authors narrate dialogue, create audiobooks, add soundtracks to their stories from their Android device, and much more. "Audio clips can bring stories to life. Wattpad writers can use sound effects to add impact to a story, narrate an excerpt, or share a playlist to entertain their readers in a new way," said Tarun Sachdeva, head of product development at Wattpad."

"Google has taken on its fair share of ambitious projects - digitizing millions and millions of books, mapping the whole world, pioneering self-driving cars. It's a company that doesn't shy away from grand plans. But one recent effort, despite its rather lofty scope, has escaped much notice. The company is working on a font that aims to include "" - every written language on Earth. "Tofu" is what the pros call those tiny, empty rectangles that show up when a script isn't supported. This is where Google's new font family, "Noto," gets its name: "No Tofu." Right now, Noto includes a wide breadth of language scripts from all around the world - specifically, 100 scripts with 100,000 characters. That includes over 600 written languages, says Jungshik Shin, an engineer on Google's text and font team. The first fonts were released in 2012. But this month, Google (in partnership with Adobe) has a new set of Chinese-Japanese-Korean fonts - the latest in their effort to make the Internet more inclusive. But as with any product intended to be universal, the implementation gets complicated - and not everyone for whom the product is intended is happy."

"ElectronLibre publie une lettre de François Hollande à Nicolas Seydoux, président de Gaumont et de l'Association de Lutte Contre la Piraterie Audiovisuelle datée du 19 avril 2012. Le contenu essentiel de cette lettre tient en deux phrases : "Si je suis élu, il n'y aura pas de légalisation des échanges hors marché, ni de contribution créative" Voilà qui soulève deux questions : le candidat sait-il qu'une part significative des échanges hors marché sont encore légaux ? Le futur président normal respectant l'article 20 de la constitution qui précise que « Le Gouvernement détermine et conduit la politique de la Nation » entend-il priver le gouvernement et le parlement de leurs prérogatives en la matière ?"

"Le partage des œuvres numériques est une pratique répandue et reconnue comme étant la principale cause de violation du droit d'auteur sur Internet. Ce phénomène s'explique par une diffusion accrue des contenus due à une généralisation de l'usage d'Internet, du recours au P2P (Peer-to-Peer) dans les environnements numériques, du stockage de contenus en ligne, etc. Par ailleurs, la question de la diffusion des œuvres en ligne est controversée et suscite un débat sur la création d'un nouveau droit d'auteur face à l'émergence d'innovations technologiques et de nouveaux services reposant entre autres sur le numérique, la Télévision IP ou encore les Smartphone."

"Hier, la Hadopi a publié le premier volet de son étude sur la faisabilité et la pertinence d'un système de rémunération proportionnelle du partage. Cette note dresse un inventaire et une analyse des usages en matière d'accès aux oeuvres sur Internet. [...] A la lecture de cette note, force est de constater que la Hadopi est effectivement arrivée exactement là où elle le voulait : une démolition en règle de la notion même d'échanges non-marchands."

"The Pirate Book by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska is both a visual essay and anthology, written in the wake of the Jolly Roger's infamous skull and crossbones and compiled during its journey across the four corners of the world. In this book, the authors invite us to shift our perspective on piracy itself. This polyphonic work constitutes an attempt at probing the ambiguity inherent to piracy and at re-evaluating the issues related to it."