LISNews: Librarian News

Headline: Kindle to Generate $5.42 bln Revenue in 2011 for Amazon

If I had to guess how much revenue was generated I might have said 1 or 2 billion and thought that was a massive number. Would have had to double the guess and add another billion. The $5 bln is revenue and the article says that profit is more than $1 billion.

Full article

New program will integrate with all existing ebook catalogs offered through OverDrive

Library patrons across the United States will soon be able to borrow ebooks from over 11,000 libraries using Amazon's Kindle reading device.

Long a missing link in the library lending chain, Amazon's announcement today that it will offer, sometime later this year, Kindle library lending is likely to create a flood of demand, since many patrons have long been puzzled and librarians irritated by the inability to use the market-leading device to access library books.

(UPDATE) "It is going to be a seamless experience, that's all I can say at this point," Burleigh said in a subsequent interview. "As we develp the process we will give demos but that won't be for a while, but every ebook in the library's collection will be deliverable in the Kindle format [AZW] so libraries won't need to add a new format. ..These are Kindle ebooks and they are in the Kindle format that will be delivered directly to the Kindle reading device or the app," he said.

Full article at:LibraryJournal.com

I keep seeing the Gizmodo article picked up around the web – that is the one that incorrectly says that you will lose your Kindle back issues of a magazine if you cancel your subscription. This is just wrong and is an example of one of the downsides of the web – it perpetuates and spreads misinformation.

Full article at Teleread

New York Times: To publicize the release of “The Pale King,” a posthumously published novel by David Foster Wallace that is set in an Internal Revenue Service processing center, Hachette Book Group created a marketing campaign centered on the traditional tax day: April 15. Except that’s not really when it went on sale.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble were selling the book on their Web sites on Wednesday, long before many bookstores would receive copies. Nicole Dewey, a spokeswoman for Little, Brown, part of Hachette, said the official on-sale date for the book was March 22, but the publication date — when the book is available everywhere — remained April 15. (A countdown clock on the Hachette Web site ticks away the days, hours and minutes until April 15.) “I don’t really understand the confusion,” Ms. Dewey said. “This happens all the time. There’s nothing unusual about it.”

It was a distinction lost on many bookstores, who erupted in protest on Wednesday when they heard that Amazon was already selling the hotly anticipated book. -- Read More