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Springwise (@springwise) reports that German start-up Readmill (@readmill) has combined its “passion for reading, innovation, and technology to create a social ebook reader for the iPad, pitched as the ‘Last.fm for reading.’”

Readmill, currently in closed Beta, offers users a selection of mainly public domain titles. While reading, users can highlight their favorite passages and share them with others for commenting, either by posting them to their Readmill profile, or via Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr. As well as being able to recommend titles and view recommended titles from other readers, there is also a comment thread where users can post their thoughts on individual ebooks. Other features include a night mode, which switches page color to black and text color to white, while built in tracking enables the reader to see how long they have spent reading each ebook.

Read the story in full.

In addition to Readmill, TNW (@TheNextWeb) reports "Kobo launches Vox, the first social ebook reader with Facebook integration." 

How will this new concept influence your publishing strategy? Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate publishing’s white water rapids.

Chart source: The Verge (@verge)

Amazon today announced the availability of the ereaders Kindle ($79), Kindle Touch ($99), and the Kindle Fire, an Android-powered touchscreen tablet with a 7-inch display that will sell for just $199, or less than Barnes & Noble's $249 Nook Color and less than half of Apple's entry-level $499 iPad.

Read the news:

Warc (@WarcEditors): "Publishers embrace Amazon's tablet."

Apple Insider (@appleinsider): “Amazon Kindle Fire aims to undercut Apple's iPad with $199 price.”

“Amazon's new $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch stick with e-ink display.”

Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) live blog of the announcement.

PW writes, “The Kindle has a new feature called ‘x-ray’ that lets you look at ‘the bones of the book,’ by which Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos means looking up various historical references and real characters mentioned on a particular page of a book. Amazon has ‘pre-calculated all of the interesting phrases’ in a book, so along with the book comes a ‘side-file’ with all of this information included.”

According to new report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., the world e-readers market is forecast to reach 53,870,000 units by the year 2017. The global economic recession, which put several industries under pressure and in a state of turmoil, has failed to rattle the market for e-readers making it an exceptional product.

The report states that the “growing popularity of these handy devices is pushing the book, magazine, and newspaper publishing industries to redefine their existence in this digital age and in the aftermaths of economic turmoil. Although sales of ebooks presently account for only a small portion of the overall book publishing market, with the passage of time, this segment is forecast to emerge a mainstream market.”

Read this in full.

This article in The Economist (@TheEconomist) summarizes the state of publishing right now.

To see how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome — anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer ebooks in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as ebooks, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of ebooks than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores....

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is the gradual disappearance of the shop window. Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollinsPublishers (@HarperCollins), points out that a film may be released with more than $100m of marketing behind it. Music singles often receive radio promotion. Publishers, on the other hand, rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But Mr Murray says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.

Efforts are under way. This week a British outfit called aNobii (@aNobii) released a trial version of a website that it hopes will become a Wikipedia-style community of book lovers, with an option to buy....

Read this in full.

See also the CNN (@CNN) extended essay by Todd Leopold, "The Death and Life of a Great American Bookstore."

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate these publishing white water rapids.

BtoB (@btobmagazine) says paper use by the magazine, newspaper, book, and other publishing sectors will fall by 12% to 21% by 2015 compared with 2010 levels, according to a report released by RISI, which provides information to the paper industry.

The report, The Impact of Media Tablets on Publication Paper Markets, projects that tablet device sales will reach 195 million units by 2015 and contribute to the decline in paper usage.

“Significant demand impacts could come as soon as 2012,” says John Maine, RISI's VP-world graphic paper.

Tablet ownership is skewing beyond the market of young men, according to NielsenWire (@NielsenWire).

Back in Q3 2010, for example, 62% of tablet owners were under the age of 34 and only 10% were over the age of 55. By Q2 2011, only 46% of tablet owners were under the age of 34 and the percentage of those over 55 had increased to 19%.

Ereader ownership is changing too. Sixty-one percent of all eReader owners are now female, compared to 46% in Q3 2010. As Econsultancy (@Econsultancy) says, tablets are from Mars and ereaders are from Venus.

(Smartphone owners are now evenly split between male and female and tablets remain primarily male.)

Read this in full.

In a new Pew Research Center (@pewinternet) report, 49% of college presidents use a tablet computer at least occasionally and 42% use an e-reader. 

How will the fact that tablets and ereaders are becoming more mainstream impact your publishing plans?

On O’Reilly Radar (@radar), Jenn Webb (@JennWebb) interviews Rochelle Grayson (@RochelleGrayson), CEO of BookRiff, (@BookRiff), a publishing start-up going live at the end of September. Jenn asks, “Ever want to compile your own cookbook, travel guide or textbook? Has your publisher edited out sections of your book you'd like to share with interested readers? BookRiff aims to solve these problems by creating new ways to access and compile content.”

Her interview explains how BookRiff works and how it can benefit publishers and consumers. Rochelle says her company is based on an open market concept, allowing publishers to sell the content they want at prices they set and consumers to buy and customize that content as they see fit; each getting a percentage of sales along the way.

A Riff is a remix of chapters from published books, essays, articles, or even one's own content. The concept behind BookRiff is to create an online platform that allows consumers and publishers to remix and to resell content, while ensuring that all original content owners and contributors get paid.

BookRiff’s target audience is “domain experts” who can curate — and perhaps even create — content that is of interest to a specific reading audience. This could include things like cookbooks, travel guides, extended “authors editions,” and custom textbooks.

Read this in full.

How do you foresee this effecting your publishing/sales/distribution plans for the next 12 months?

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High-profile, best-selling author Tim Ferriss’ (@tferriss) signing a deal with Amazon (@amazon) to publish his next book is causing conversation among traditional publishers. Jeffrey Trachtenberg (@JeffreyT1), book reporter at The Wall Street Journal (@wsj), discusses it in this video.

The latest in the Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) / Digital Book World (@digibookworld) free Webcast series, "Digital Textbooks: Innovations From the Academic Business Model" (#dbw) featured panelists Matt MacInnis, CEO, Inkling (@inkling), Eric Frank, co-founder, Flat World Knowledge (@flat_world), and Brett Sandusky, director of product innovation for Kaplan Publishing (@ReadKaplan).

The panelists all agreed that with expansion of digital capabilities, publishing has become an ongoing venture with continuous opportunities for improvement, thanks to the 2-way communication with readers. MacInnis said the iPad is the vehicle that’s reinventing the textbook from the bottom up. Inkling doesn’t try to emulate a book; e.g., it doesn’t paginate. He said Inkling’s vision for publishing is moving “from pages to objects, from serial to hierarchical, from monolithic to modular, from static to dynamic, from passive to interactive.”

Read this in full.

The discussion's archive is available until August 16 and can be found here.

This article in The New York Times (@nytimes) says, “The publishing industry has expanded in the past three years as Americans increasingly turned to ebooks and juvenile and adult fiction, according to a new survey of thousands of publishers, retailers, and distributors that challenges the doom and gloom that tends to dominate discussions of the industry’s health.”

BookStats, a comprehensive survey conducted by two major trade groups that was released early Tuesday, reveals that in 2010 publishers generated net revenue of $27.9 billion, a 5.6% increase over 2008. Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1% increase since 2008.

The Association of American Publishers (@AmericanPublish) and the Book Industry Study Group (@BISG) collaborated on the report and collected data from 1,963 publishers, including the six largest trade publishers. The survey encompassed five major categories of books: trade, K-12 school, higher education, professional, and scholarly.

“The printed word is alive and well whether it takes a paper delivery or digital delivery,” says Tina Jordan, vice president of the Association of American Publishers.

Read the story in full.

Also see coverage by Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly), “Industry Sales Rose 3.1% in 2010; Trade Ebook Sales the Big Winner.”

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