Should content owners sell through a subscription or on a piece-by-piece basis? That depends on the country they will be selling to, according to data that shows wildly varying patterns. Read more »
Another vendor hoping to provide a paid content mechanism to online publishers is raising money from backers including Apple’s former overseas lieutenant. Read more »
Browser maker Opera launches a music service in to a Russian market that badly needs legal options, whilst iTunes Store’s debut is reportedly shelved. Read more »
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter community site and digital bookstore Pottermore.com now lets users gift ebooks and digital audiobooks to other people. The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a collection of stories, is now also available as an ebook for the first time. Read more »
The European Commission wants to make it easier for digital services to offer content across the bloc’s national borders. Now research examines whether citizens want it as much as operators do. Read more »
Janus Friis is slowly taking the wraps off his new service Vdio – and it turns out that it’s not a Netflix killer at all: The company just launched a private beta test in the U.K. and the U.S., offering iTunes-like movie and TV show consumption. Read more »
Social media chatter claiming incorrectly that a British politician was a pedophile has proven a far-reaching scandal in the UK — and one of the rare times that the network has self-corrected a lie. Is this a new dawn? Don’t get your hopes up. Read more »
A start-up is trying to bring Next Issue Media-style magazine subscriptions to European iPads. But Le Kiosk is taking on €5.6 million in funding to improve its underlying tech with social features and more. Read more »
Hachette and Random House’s parent companies Lagardère and Bertelsmann reported earnings Tuesday. At Hachette, ebooks made up 20 percent of adult trade book sales in both the U.S. and U.K. divisions. Read more »
TV and tech folk nowadays talk the same language. But, as London’s eastern Tech City neighborhood gains attention, envious western broadcasters fight back with their own newly-named space. Read more »
Russian TV broadcasters are beginning to cooperate to ensure one site can become the go-to video portal. But Videomore doesn’t yet have 100 percent partner coverage. Read more »
German publisher Axel Springer is buying heavily in to European classified sites to court digital and international growth. Snapping up Belgian property service Immoweb, it says the move will make up for a weakening print ad sector. Read more »
Reuters cites two unidentified sources who says that the European Commission has accepted Apple and four publishers’ proposed ebook pricing settlement. As we previously reported, the EU settlement includes Apple, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan parent company Holtzbrinck. Macmillan and Apple are not settling in the U.S. Read more »
It’s going to take a Herculean effort to depose Google as Brits’ search engine of choice. But, percentage point by percentage point, Bing is fronting up, knocking its rival’s share below the important 90 percent mark. Read more »
Nordic newspapers will be the latest to offer unlimited streaming music through Aspiro’s WiMP service, after publisher Schibsted bought the firm. But latest funding for Aspiro’s growth comes from outside of publishing. Read more »
Tomorrow’s pay-TV box could be a handheld device or an in-TV app, if Magine, a new Swedish service using existing consumer gadgets and cloud distribution, gets its way. Read more »
Is this the great firewall of Russia? Free-speech campaigners oppose a new agency that is blocking objectionable content. But, so far, outlawed sites contain child porn and drugs, not political dissent. Read more »
Indie travel publisher TRVL didn’t like the software it had to use to make its free, iPad-only magazine – so it built its own. Now TRVL is giving away PRSS, hoping to kickstart other would-be moguls, and make a buck of its own. Read more »
Payment meters win another exponent with news The Telegraph will require subscriptions from non-UK readers for 20 monthly articles and app access. Can this strategy of charging its biggest online audience pay off? Read more »
Central Europe’s Piano Media has tried to build nationwide shared “paywalls” for dozens of news sites. Now it is acquiring a technology startup to offer news meters that can’t be defeated by deleting cookies. Read more »
What happens in Belgium doesn’t necessarily stay in Belgium. Now Google News is facing a Brazilian boycott and France is threatening to copy a German-style tax on excerpting its newspapers. What’s an aggregator to do? Read more »
UK commercial broadcaster ITV has long funded its free shows with advertising. Three years after declaring its intention to charge online, it is now finally publicly testing a paid VOD service. Read more »
Last week’s report is now confirmed, after Pearson and Bertelsmann took the weekend to hammer out a merger of their book publishers. But what is the rationale behind the big deal? Read more »
Scandinavian newspaper publisher Schibsted is keeping up its efforts to diversify and attract user payments by investing in a regional ebook service. Read more »
UK-based startup ValoBox, which lets publishers sell ebooks by chunks, is launching with a list of publishing partners including O’Reilly in the US and Guardian Books in the UK. Read more »
Magazine publisher Burda wants to take complete ownership of LinkedIn rival Xing, while rival Axel Springer is selling a games site to focus on its growing online content and classifieds business. Read more »
In response to a report that publishers Penguin and Random House are merging, Penguin parent company Pearson said that the two companies are indeed discussing a merger but “there is no certainty that the discussions will lead to a transaction.” Read more »
In Russia’s fast-growing internet scene, Mail.ru is successfully marshalling its diverse arsenal of social network and game services to attract paying users, while its social advertising prospects turn down. Read more »
Amazon’s global content strategy is becoming a step broader and more integrated through greater distribution for its Kindle range and inclusion of its video service Lovefilm on UK devices. Read more »
The exclusive provider of ad services to a host of Italian online publishers is taking on money to fund development of new ad formats. Read more »
In the online local listings and reviews segment, US big boy Yelp is giving a five-star review to Hamburg-based peer Qype – and buying it to expand the breadth of its business overseas. Read more »
4G mobile networks promise fast content access out of the home. The UK’s first such network is bundling movies and free WiFi access – but will consumers pay the 4G premium? Read more »
Amazon has apparently discontinued the Kindle Touch, which started at $99, in favor of the new Kindle Paperwhite, which starts at $119 and is still experiencing 4- to 6-week shipping delays. The company also discontinued the 9.7″ Kindle DX this month. Read more »
The digital vendor that powers music services for Samsung, HTC, RIM and others is taking on investment to expand its offering from downloads to streaming, radio and more. Read more »
Among the digital trends at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year: Startups selling ebooks, self-publishing developments, and an emphasis on mobile phones as the ebook revolution goes global. Read more »
It can finally be confirmed that Levin is in charge of Poolworks, formerly VZ Networks, the company behind German Facebook clone StudiVZ. But why was the new owner’s identity such a secret? Read more »
Amazon is expanding the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which allows Kindle-owning Prime members to borrow one ebook for free each month, to the United Kingdom, Germany and France. The move comes at a time when Amazon is heavily promoting its self-publishing program in Europe. Read more »
Rovio, whose “Angry Birds” app has been downloaded over 1 billion times, announced its first book app, a $0.99 iPad cookbook called “Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes,” at the Frankfurt Book Fair Thursday. “We’re looking for millions of downloads,” CMO Peter Vesterbacka said. Read more »
Ebook pricing and device trends that hold in North American countries don’t necessarily work for less developed market. Executives from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google, France’s FNAC and India’s Indiaplaza discussed similarities and differences between digital reading cultures Wednesday afternoon at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Read more »
Google has apparently offered to indicate when its search results point to its own properties, in its ongoing negotiations with EC antitrust investigators. But that offer likely doesn’t neutralise the original complaints. Read more »
