The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has urged local retailers to voice their concerns about eBook price-fixing as it considers a lawsuit against Apple and five of the world’s largest book publishers, The Financial Review reported on Thursday. “The ACCC has previously stated that impediments to emerging competition involving online traders is an area of priority,” a spokesperson said. “Competition concerns may arise where traders seek to restrict the discounting of products b...

LG on Thursday unveiled the world’s first plastic e-paper display, which the company claims will “revolutionize the E-Book market.” The 6-inch E Ink display features 1,024 x 768-pixel resolution and can bend at an angle of up to 40 degrees. “With the world’s first plastic EPD, LG Display has once again proven its reputation for leadership and innovation with a product we believe will help greatly popularize the E-Book market,” said Mr. Sang Duck Yeo, Head of Operations for ...

RapidShare is widely known as an invaluable tool for the illegal sharing of copyrighted digital material. Much like Megaupload, which was shuttered earlier this year when company founder Kim Dotcom was arrested and charged with racketeering and violating anti-piracy laws, RapidShare allows users to upload any file and share a link with other users who may then download the content. While some users share files legally with RapidShare, millions more upload copyrighted movies, music and eBooks which are then do...

E Ink, the popular company that provides paper-look gray-scale displays for eReaders, reported consolidated revenues of $48.02 million in January, down 63.6% from the same month last year and 11% sequentially. The growing popularity of media tablets with full-color displays likely played a big role in the decline — sales of Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet are thought to be eating into the companies’ respective dedicated eReader businesses to an extent. Even thoug...

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is a smash hit, with fourth-quarter sales that may exceed even the most lofty estimates reported ahead of the tablet’s recent launch. In just over six weeks of availability this quarter, analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate that Amazon will sell as many as 6 million Kindle Fire tablets. Add to that another 8 million Kindle-branded eBook readers the firm sees Amazon selling between October and the end of this year, and the retailer looks to be in store for a huge holiday quarter....

The European Commission announced Tuesday that it has opened formal proceedings to investigate whether or not major eBook publishers, possibly “with the help of Apple,” are “engaged in anti-competitive practices affecting the sale of eBooks.” The publishing companies named in the investigation include Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holzbrinck. “The Commission will in particular investigate whether these publishing groups ...

Barnes & Noble on Thursday reported its results for the second fiscal quarter of 2012, in which it revealed its Nook business has seen stellar growth over the last year. The company said that its Nook business, which includes sales of tablets, eReaders and eBooks, pulled in $220 million in the second quarter, up 85% from the same quarter last year. Barnes & Noble did not reveal how many Nook devices it sold during the quarter but said that it expects to sell “millions of devices” during th...

Strong demand for Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet and the continued popularity of Kindle eReaders lead to the retail giant’s best-ever Black Friday for the Kindle family of products. Amazon on Monday announced that sales of Kindle devices on Black Friday quadrupled last year’s sales, setting a new record. The company neglected to report sales figures, however it did say it sold millions of new Kindle eReaders and Kindle Fire tablets combined before the Black Friday shopping weekend began. &...

Amazon’s Kindle Library Lending service, first announced in April, is now live in the United States. The service allows Kindle users to borrow eBooks from more than 11,000 participating libraries across the country. Here’s how it works: simply visit the website of a U.S. library with support for OverDrive and then, provided you have a library card, check out a Kindle book by clicking “Get for Kindle.” The eBook will then be delivered to your Kindle via Wi-Fi or USB. Library Lending is ...

Amazon launched its new Kindle Cloud Reader service on Wednesday that provides users with access their Kindle library using Chrome or Safari on Mac, PC, Linux and the Chromebook. Kindle Cloud Reader is also optimized for the iPad and offers a caching feature for offline reading. To get started, simply navigate to http://read.amazon.com and install the small required plug-in. We gave the service a quick run this morning and were impressed by how fast it loaded our eBook library. We definitely still prefer the ...

Sony is expected to introduce a new family of eReader devices to challenge the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook devices next month. In an interview with Bloomberg, Sony Electronics’ vice president of digital reading Phil Lubell said that the new eReaders will offer both software and hardware enhancements, although he wasn’t specific on what exactly the changes are. Lubell said the devices will hit the market ahead of his company’s S1 and S2 Android tablets. AT&T announced yester...

Amazon announced on Wednesday that AT&T will sponsor a new Kindle 3G with Special Offers, a deal that has lowered the price of the device $50 to $139.99. In a statement, AT&T’s CEO Ralph de la Vega said that the Kindle 3G is “by far the fastest growing connected device” on AT&T’s network. Amazon’s “Special Offers” devices come at the cost of ad-sponsored content. Users will see advertisements at the bottom of the screen and can launch the “AdMashR...

IDC recently published a report that provided a snapshot view of the tablet and eReader markets. The company noted that in the first quarter, for the first time ever, Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Color lead the eReader pack ahead of Amazon’s Kindle. Even though Barnes & Noble just introduced the “all new NOOK,” a black and white device, IDC says that the lack of a color screen on Amazon’s Kindle “clearly impacted the company’s previous dominance in the eReader marke...

During its earnings call on Tuesday, Barnes & Noble’s chief executive officer William Lynch discussed several figures related to book sales — the most interesting of which is that eBooks are flying off the digital shelves. “We now sell three times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined on BN.com,” Lynch said during the call, noting that the Barnes & Noble NOOK’s market share has increased slightly to 27%, up from 25% last quarter. Similarly, the firm̵...