Brian Murray, the chief executive of HarperCollins, said in December that e-books enhanced with video, author interviews and social-networking applications could command higher retail prices for publishers than current e-books. Many of the country's largest publishing houses are worried about the sale of new bestsellers for only $9.99 in the e-book format. New releases of enhanced e-books could sell for $14.99 to $19.99, a person familiar with the situation said. HarperCollins is a unit of News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

The HarperCollins negotiations with Apple represent a direct challenge to Amazon, which dominates the fast-growing e-book market but which could face significant competition from an Apple tablet.

HarperCollins is one of several major publishing houses that are holding back e-book versions of some new hardcover best sellers. The HarperCollins account of the 2008 presidential election, "Game Change," by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, was released in hardcover Jan. 11 but the e-book edition doesn't go on sale until Feb. 23. Enhanced e-books likely would be available for sale simultaneously with the hardcovers.

Simon & Schuster is delaying by four months the electronic-book editions of about 35 leading titles coming out early next year, taking a dramatic stand against the cut-rate $9.99 pricing of e-book best sellers. A second publisher, Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, said it has similar plans in the works.

"The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback," said Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS Corp. "We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible."

The efforts cap a tumultuous year for publishers as the industry begins a migration from traditional truck-and-bookshelf distribution to nearly simultaneous wireless delivery to consumers. It is also an acknowledgment that book pricing has become the most significant issue on the publishing landscape.

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David Young, chief executive of the Hachette Book Group, said that Hachette, beginning in January or February, will delay the e-book publication of the vast majority of its titles for three to four months. "We're doing this to preserve our industry," Mr. Young said. "I can't sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It's about the future of the business."

The German book industry is a stranger to this new digital world. According to the estimates of Goldmedia, 10,000 readers have already been sold in Germany. But, according to the GfK Group, a leading market-research company, in the first six months of 2009, only 65,000 e-books were sold, excluding specialist works.

Unlike in America, the cost of downloading an e-book in Germany is also frighteningly high. The Kindle's main competitor, the Sony Reader, has been available in German bookshops for a while now for about E250. But the Sony device cannot directly download e-books from the Web. And since e-books are just as expensive as their cheapest printed versions in Germany, they are still fairly expensive when compared to the price of the required hardware.

In fact, the price of an e-book can only go down once the paperback edition has hit the market, which usually takes about two years. Ironically, even Schatzing's "Limit" -- a science fiction novel that celebrates the technology of the future -- has not been able to get past these policies of blockade.

More than 3,000 McGraw-Hill Professional titles (business, medical and technical) are already available in Kindle format. This fall, Amazon will use the McGraw-Hill content in its on-campus trial programs to make Kindle DX devices available to students. Participating colleges and universities will distribute hundreds of the devices to students across a range of academic disciplines.

Ed Stanford, president of McGraw-Hill Higher Education, said, "The modern student body increasingly requires digital access and capabilities, and we are pleased to be strengthening our partnership with Amazon to help meet these critical needs."

In separate announcements, a coalition of four university presses have received a planning grant to study the feasibility of a collaborative scholarly e-book program, and the University of Chicago Press announced a multi-faceted program to make 700 e-books available immediately.

A coalition of presses from New York University, Rutgers, Temple and the University of Pennsylvania, plan to use a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to hire a technical consultant for a six-month study looking at the feasibility of a collaborative scholarly e-book publishing program. The new program will focus on studying the particular needs of university presses and their library partners. (A spokesperson for Temple Univ. press noted that TUP plans to immediately release 50 new e-books that are not a part of this announcement or coalition study.)

The coalition of presses plans to study how to bring together a wide variety of university presses of different sizes—a minimum of ten presses at launch—in an e-book publishing program that would launch with at least 10,000 e-book titles and add five to 10 new UPs each year over 5 years. According to the details of the grant, the new program would focus on the library market and then on supplying e-books to students as well as looking at variety of payment/delivery models—from purchase/subscription to rental models, bundling and POD.

With the price of e-books still a hot topic, the nonprofit research organization RAND Corp. has changed the retail price on all of its e-books to $9.95 each. The director of publications and creative services, Jane Ryan, said RAND's production, distribution and freight costs are lower for e-books, and "we want to pass these savings on to the public. Given the timeliness of our research, we want to make our work quickly available on multiple platforms, including smart phones." RAND had previously based its e-book pricing on the retail price of print editions.

Marketing director John Warren said, "The economics of e-book distribution are different than print, where the cost of printing, distribution and returns factor into the price paid by consumers. Color charts and a greater number of pages, for example, drive up the cost of print-on-demand, but are not a factor in electronic books."

Fictionwise, which operates the Fictionwise.com and eReader.com Web sites, was founded in 2000 by Steve and Scott Pendergast, who will continue to head the company B&N said it will operate as a separate business unit based in New Jersey. B&N added, however, that Fictionwise is part of its overall digital strategy, which includes launching an e-bookstore later this year. Last month, PW reported that B&N had plans to open an e-bookstore sometime in March; the company had no comment at the time.

Publishers now on board include Houghton Mifflin, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Hachette and Penguin Group USA. Having these big names is a big step forward for iTunes itself in becoming an e-book shop and the iPhone in becoming a legitimate e-book reader and competitor to products like the Kindle and the Sony E-Reader.

The first official books will begin to roll out Monday and include titles such as Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight," Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass" and a number of others by Christopher Paolini, Brad Meltzer and Scott Westerfeld. There are already several e-book readers in the app store, as well as a number of out-of-copyright e-books, but ScrollMotion's product is unique in that these are stand-alone and newer in-copyright titles and best-selling novels.

Each book is a separate application using Scroll Motion's new reader technology called Iceberg and is wrapped only in the FairPlay iTunes DRM, putting Apple directly into the e-book business by allowing them to pick up a certain percentage of each sale.

Random House has announced plans to add 6,000 backlist titles to its current e-book library. With these additions, Random House will have nearly 15,000 titles available in the digital format. (The house, which is the biggest trade publisher in the world, is already one of the largest e-book publishers.) Random will also, for the first time, make its entire catalog of both new and existing titles, available in the emerging standard format for the industry, e-Pub.

Among the titles being digitzed, which include those from the children's and adult divisions, are books by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Coben, Louis L'Amour, John Updike, Mary Pope Osborne and Barbara Park. Markus Dohle, chairman and CEO of Random, said the publisher is "making significant investments in the digital future" with moves such as this one.

Kate Tentler, senior v-p of S&S Digital, and Sue Fleming, v-p and executive director, online and consumer marketing, will report to Hirshhorn. "Digital initiatives are a top priority for Simon & Schuster, and we are determined to avail ourselves to the maximum extent of the digital era opportunities to find, interact, and deliver content instantaneously and around the clock to readers worldwide," said S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy. According to Reidy, Hirshhorn and her staff will help S&S "develop new businesses, partnerships and publishing paradigms." Reidy explained that while single title online marketing will remain the responsibility of S&S's different imprints, the new digital unit "will act as a support and resource for our divisions, developing cross marketing platforms that the entire company can avail itself of."

Bill Gates cited electronic textbooks as the next big thing at the launch of Microsoft operating system Vista, but unless publishers are willing to take more risks with how they make their content available, e-textbooks may be left behind by e-learning content delivered in alternative ways such as virtual learning environment plug-ins.

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Bournemouth University has brought e-books as much as possible into the virtual learning environment as well as the reading list. Student usage has been high – markedly higher than usage by academics. But this is not the case at all libraries. Monica Landoni, e-book group leader at Strathclyde University's Department of Computer and Information Sciences, carried out a project on ways to promote e-books. She found that accessibility and visibility were big issues.

No common understanding

"We discovered a lack of common understanding about what e-books were," she explained, "what their advantages over paper books (if any) were, and, importantly, the cost and implications for ever shrinking academic library budgets."

Landoni found that e-book uptake was not always as high as might be expected. "This is a very delicate subject, as the figures we saw last summer in a few academic libraries in Scotland were quite low in terms of usage but that was due to a number of reasons," she said. "E-books were often hiding deep down in catalogues. Not many readers knew they were available. E-book readers were not particularly friendly or stable or usable. And, more importantly, the titles students wanted were not available."

What would Halloween be without a little trick-or-treating? This year, make exploring some of these classic spooky tales part of your treat. Discover who famously uttered "nevermore," why Van Helsing was forced to behead the "bloofer lady" and how Ichabod Crane met his untimely end in a tranquil glen called Sleepy Hollow.

Since we've digitized the full text of these stories and novels, you can search every word. But that's not all -- whenever you see a Download button, you're free to download, save and print a PDF version to read at your own pace. And if you decide you want to buy a bound copy, "All editions" will show you multiple editions, many of which are available for purchase.

With native support for Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) as well as an XHTML-based reflow-centric publication format, Digital Editions delivers an engaging way to acquire, read, and manage content, including eBooks, digital magazines, digital newspapers and other digital publications. Initially available as a free public beta for Windows, Digital Editions will support Macintosh systems as a universal binary application, Linux platforms, as well as mobile phones and other embedded devices in future versions.

"Adobe Digital Editions builds on the ubiquitous reach of PDF and Flash and will further energize the eBook and digital publishing market," said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief operating officer at Adobe. "By creating a specialized, consumer-friendly application like Digital Editions, Adobe is ensuring publishers can securely deliver high-impact content to the widest possible audience, across hardware platforms, operating systems and devices."

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Digital Editions is designed to support a wide range of business models including public domain texts (open content), ad-supported content, library lending and other borrowing/subscription models, and the purchase of eBooks and digital content.

Digital Editions will integrate with a new hosted content authorization service to protect publisher's rights while maintaining ease-of-use for consumers. This new Adobe Digital Editions Protection Service, based on LiveCycle Policy Server, will allow publishers to choose from a flexible array of business models, with user-ID-based authorization that provides an improved user experience over competitive DRM models.

Sony today also announced the premiere of its Connect eBook store. Agreements with a number of major publishing companies have made more than 10,000 eBook titles available to download to the Reader via the companion PC software.

And for a limited time, when a Reader is registered on the Connect site, people will receive a $50 credit towards the purchase of any available eBook titles which can now be reviewed online at ebooks.connect.com.

"Today, we're writing a new chapter in digital technology for reading," said Ron Hawkins, Sony Electronics' vice president of Portable Reader Systems marketing. "Easy and enjoyable to use, the Reader fulfills the promise of electronic reading in a way that no other device has been able to do. Not intended to replace traditional books, but to supplement them, the Sony Reader allows people to take a library of books and other reading material with them wherever they go."

Starting in October, book fans will find the Reader on shelves at SonyStyle stores located in high-end fashion malls throughout the country as well as at about 300 Borders(R) stores, including Borders airport locations. Borders, the exclusive bookstore retail partner for the Reader during the upcoming holiday season, will also sell pre-paid cards for eBook downloads on the Connect service.