E-books

Kobo says that it had very good holiday sales. In fact the Kobo user base nearly doubled in the last 6 weeks, with "hundreds of thousands of activations" occurred every day from Christmas to the new year. Kobo is offering both an e-reader and a tablet, but they wouldn't say how many sales they got for each.

E-book gifting also increased - 200% from last year. The most popular ebooks gifted during the holidays were Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and The Song of Ice and Fire (four-book bundle) by George R. R. Martin.

Amazon announced that their upcoming Kindle Format 8 (KF8) e-book file format will include HTML 5 support, which will enable publishers to produce picture books, comics and graphic novels easily. The KF8 will not, however, support audio and video tags. The KF8 will only be supported on the Kindle Fire.

There are reports that Amazon is set to release a new subscription service for digital books. The idea is similar to Netflix - you will gain access to a large library of books for an annual fee (the number of books you can access in a month will be limited).

via Engadget

UK's book chain store Waterstone announced plans to launch an e-reader device and an e-book store by spring 2012. The company's managing director says he was inspired by the Nook's success, and wants to take Waterstone into the 21st century...

Waterstone has been offering e-books and Sony e-readers since 2008, but now they seem to take this more seriously...

Bookeen just sent us word that they opened a new e-book store called BookeenStore. The new store is aimed towards Europeans - it currently has French books only, but will later add Germand and other languages. This new store offers ePub and PDF format books, and has a large selection of free e-books with no DRM.

Amazon announced Kindle textbook rentals. Rental period can be between 30 to 360 days, and students can expect up to 80% discounts (which varies depending on the rental period). Amazon says that tens of thousands of textbooks are already available to rent (from a number of publishers including John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis).

3M launched the "3M Cloud Library eBook Lending Service" - a turnkey solution for libraries developed by Germany's txtr (3M recently invested in txtr). The Cloud Library offers digital content and in-library hardware, along with apps for borrowing and reading.

3M and txtr’s technologies include the eReading app for the service, which allows patrons to easily browse the catalog, check out materials and read them on a computer, smart phone, tablet or eReader device. For patrons without an eReader of their own, the 3M Cloud Library service includes 3M e-readers, which can be checked out like any other lendable materials. We don't have technical details regarding 3M's e-readers yet.