Note the author’s royalty: 35% for works of at least 10,000 words, and an “experimental” rate of 20% for short stories of between 5,000 and 10,000 words. The article does not specify how Amazon and WB will share the remainder.

Thank you to Taylor for sending this story along.

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.

Although the $1,500 pre-orders of the Explorer Edition will not be compatible with prescription lenses, some speculate the price will be anywhere from $200 (roughly the cost of the parts to make the device) to a higher-end $500. Read Robert Scoble’s piece about this here.

Go here to download the stories – the final one will be released May 9.

Lost in the excitement is the decision to cull Fireworks. Web design and development veterans will remember using Macromedia Fireworks in the late ’90s to slice up and export graphical website designs from Photoshop files into table-based HTML layouts. It is also interesting to note that Fireworks used the PNG format with metadata as a native file format. (UPDATE: Also forgot to mention – it was the first software program to provide truly advanced editing tools for the horrible animated GIF, which is currently “all the rage.”)

In any case, any smart book publishing industry analyst will pay attention to this move, and will likely already have spent many hours considering whether it might work with book-length content…

I do not like the fact that Riffle forces you to follow 15 strangers based on your selection of a few books. This can be changed once you’ve created your profile.

Check it out – you can sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account, but unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be able to import Goodreads picks and reviews. Not yet, anyway.