The Digital Reader

It’s Valentine’s Day. If you’re thinking about buying a gadget for that special someone, Amazon is having a sale.

The best deals can be found on Amazon’s European websites, where the basic black Kindle is selling for €20 or £10 off the regular retail, bringing the price down to £59 and €59,

If you are in the US you can’t get a discount on the Kindle but you do have a chance to buy the Kindle Fire HD 8.9. Both the Wifi and LTE models are on sale with discounts of $30 and $50, respectively.

Amazon.com

Amazon.fr

Amazon.de

Amazon.co.uk

The American Library Association is holding their Midwinter Conference later this week in Seattle, and that means I have been getting press releases.

Library tech and ebook vendors are talking up their new products, new features, and so on, but there’s one story missing this year which was a hot topic last year. That would be library ebooks on the Kindle.
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Remember that 7″ budget tablet from Asus which showed up on a Russian website a few weeks back?  Asus has just announced that that tablet is expected to reach the US market in April with a retail of $150.

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As more and more content goes digital, brick-and-mortar stores are going to have to come up with new ways to sell said content. Luckily Red Touch Media can help. This Salt lake City based retail services company was at CES this week showing off their new service. They’ve developed a platform which will enable stores to set up a kiosk and sell movies, music and ebooks. I stopped by their booth earlier today and they gave me a tour.  The demo was equal parts creepy and interesting.

The creepyness comes from the face recognition features. Besides just selling content, Red Touch Media has included a way for the kiosk to serve up ads based on the gender and age of the customer using the kiosk. It was quite accurate, too, and that’s a good thing for the retailers which will be installing the kiosks.
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The digital publishing startup Graphicly has just revealed that it is in the middle of a bridge round of funding.

This ebook distributor is seeking to raise a million dollars in financing, money which CEO Micah Bowers is planning to use to “get Graphicly to profitability, which the company should reach by the middle of 2013″. Specifically, Graphicly is borrowing money and securing the loan with an equity stake in the company.
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E-Fun is clearly planning to undercut more than just Kindle Fire and Nook tablet sales this coming year; they’ve just released some details on a new 8″ budget tablet that will be revealed at CES next week and sell for $170 this spring.
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We’re probably never going to have real sales figures for the Kindle Fire or most other Android tablets, but all signs point to some moderate gains in market share.

Chitaka has just released new figures based on a survey of a sample of hundreds of millions of impressions from its advertising network between December 1 and December 27, 2012. Their data shows that the Kindle Fire, Samsung, and even the Microsoft Surface have picked up market share at the expense of the iPad.
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What with the last month’s launch of iBookstore in Brazil, and last week’s launch of the Livraria Cultura branch of the Kobo eBookstore, Amazon must be feeling the pressure to get the Brazilian Kindle Store up and running soonest.

That could explain a recent goof made behind the scenes at KDP, Amazon’s self-pub program. According to David Gaughran, the confirmation emails which Amazon sends out to newly registered authors and publishers now includes a mention of  amazon.com.br, Amazon’s still unopened Brazilian website.
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Pixel Qi might not be having much success in getting their screens on to consumer devices but they are having some success in a number of niche markets. Last week I got a brief look at this baby:

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