A £20,000 award has been announced for a storytelling contest hosted by Amazon for a yarn that is judged on the basis of popular demand.
Kindle
By Jaya Bhattacharji Rose Amazon India has announced that Kindle will launch digital books in five Indian languages—Hindi, Tamil, […]
By Nimish Sawant I am a voracious reader. I hoard books, both on my Amazon Kindle as well […]
Monsoon Books, the trade publisher of books on Asia with offices in Singapore and the UK, has signed up with Dutch social DRM provider Booxtream to enable direct ebook sales from its own website. With immediate effect Monsoon is also bundling free ebooks with all paperback purchases from its website.
“Monsoon was one of the first trade publishers in Southeast Asia to release its whole list as ebooks,” explains Monsoon Books publisher Philip Tatham. “We currently supply ebooks to over 70 ebook retailers globally with the majority of our ebook sales to customers in UK, North America and ANZ via the big four retailers of Amazon, Apple, Kobo and Google. However, the ebook market in Southeast Asia, which is our home territory and our largest print market, is almost non-existent and we hope to combat this by selling ebooks direct to customers. With the exception of Google, there has been little or no push by the big ebook retailers into Southeast Asia. Tech-savvy customers in Singapore, for example, have no access to Amazon’s Kindle store unless they register an overseas credit card or use roundabout methods to purchase Kindle books involving gift cards.”
‘The Guest’, a Kindle novella by Suneetha Balakrishnan, is on offer for free download for 3 days from 21 December.
The Guest is a day in the life of three people of an Indian family and the dynamics of Indian family life is not quite what we watch on TV, Balakrishnan told Kitaab. “The Guest can be downloaded into your Kindle or the free app Kindle on PC on amazon, and its a free download for three days from 21st December 2014 (Pacific Time),” she said.
In an experiment, the Kindle readers scored significantly lower than paperback readers on questions about when events in the story occurred. They also performed almost twice as poorly when asked to arrange 14 plot points in the correct sequence: NYT
Do people read as well on screens as they do on paper? Scientists aren’t quite sure. While the type of E Ink used in the latest generation of Kindles and other tablets has been shown to be as or even more legible than printed text, other studies have indicated that — in terms of reading comprehension — the medium doesn’t much matter.
Even the most voracious readers will take a few months to get the most out of Amazon.com’s latest […]
In the SWF Publishing Symposium yesterday, Ravi Mirchandani of Atlantic Books, Jayapriya Vasudevan of Jacaranda Literary Agency and Anna Davis of Curtis Brown Literary and Talent Agency discussed new and different ways to get published
Before the arrival of digital publishing and distribution platforms (such as Amazon.com), agents and publishers were the gatekeepers, and authors were at the mercy of these agencies. Not any more. That is true to some extent and we all have heard about this trend but what is the whole truth? Are agents and traditional publishers still relevant? One of the Symposium tracks discussed this topic at the National Museum of Singapore.
Anna Davis said that agencies are still important and relevant to shape the career of a writer. She sees, at least in the UK where she works, more people reading books off their Kindles on the London tube but physical books are still relevant and so are traditional publishers. Physical books are doing well in the UK market, she said. Novels are still doing very well in the UK and it is possible to make good money by becoming a novelist, Anna added. An average novelist makes about 10,000 pounds a year in the UK but the bestselling authors make a lot more.
