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A few short articles about 2012 sales figures:

Ebooks now 1/5 of US book sales: Mashable

Ebooks account for nearly 1 billion in trade growth: Digital Book World

Ebooks account for 20% of US books sales in 2012: Good E-Reader

An interesting point about the above three articles is each respective author (or website editor) has his or her own way to spell “e-book.” I have struggled with this myself, mainly because there appears to be a kind of view emerging that the “camel-case” (or CamelCase) spelling – “eBook” – is “classier.” I think this is happening because people have become too influenced by brand spelling (iPhone, PowerPoint, AstroTurf, et cetera). However, it is incorrect. Forcing a lower-case “e” also looks horrible at the beginning of a sentence. If it is not a proper noun, one must be able to capitalize it at the beginning of a sentence. “EBook?” No.

Most dictionaries agree that the hyphenated “e-book” is the correct spelling. This is OK, but just as “e-mail” is now usually spelled “email,” I think “ebooks” will emerge as the standard. “E-reader” and “e-ink” will likely follow the same path. Note that the term “E Ink” with no hyphen is a brand company name, and I think the camel-case spelling “eReader” belongs to Kobo.

First of all, in spite of the fact they use the horrible phrase “the Pintrest of book discovery” even though many people have already created pinboards specifically for books, this PW article is a nice overview of Riffle, another stab at a discoverability app. (Full disclosure: the Riffle link is my referral link, and if you click on it, you’ll help me get an invitation sooner.)

Hopefully the above application can help people discover digital literary fiction. As this PW article points out, most if not all of the ebook success stories we hear about are in genre fiction, and sales of literary fiction are not growing along with the rest.

Add the print book’s cover to the long list of things from traditional publishing that have been declared “dead.” Actually, this essay by Craig Mod is a very useful exploration of how book design is changing overall, with a specific focus on how the role of the cover is being transformed by designers. This is terrific reading for anyone with an interest in book design.

Check out this article on the increase in e-reading on backlit screens.

This amazing video will make you forget that there are traditional publishers struggling with new publishing models. And from the sounds of it there is a new breed of publisher who will make authors and consumers forget that traditional publishers ever existed.

Today, Techcrunch has a short feature on Hyperink, a service enabling bloggers to turn their posts into ebooks. My first impulse is to question the need for a paid service getting in between the blog-to-book process, especially as Techcrunch pegged costs at “under $1,000 on average,” which I found a bit high until I discovered Hyperink actually provides copyediting and fact-checking services, which every self-published author should pay for.

While this article features a picture of a flexible e-Paper prototype, the Onyx Boox won’t be flexible. The idea is that this ultra-thin display is less susceptible to damage. Once you get past that, the list of compatible formats is pretty impressive.

Dual-screen tablet devices are always interesting to those who follow ereading, if only because the devices often resemble actual books (although the success of single screen ereaders has proven this to be completely unnecessary for reading). Apparently Samsung may be planning to release such a device, in spite of the fact that previous devices have failed or even been cancelled before hitting the market. One of the major hurdles is battery life.

Startup founder and software developer Jason Cohen provides an analysis of whether it is better to have more customers paying less or fewer customers paying more. This article veers away from ebook pricing a bit in favour of a more general, but still valuable analysis. However, I highly recommend his source material: a couple of guest blog posts with detailed experiments selling ebooks using each approach. Check out Part I (lower prices, more customers) and Part II (higher prices, fewer customers). You may be surprised at the results…

Joe Wikert offers a compelling theory about why Microsoft has made a $300 million investment in Barnes & Noble. He claims it’s got to be about more than just ebooks – and that it could mark the beginning of a plan to compete with Amazon and Apple.