Michael Kozlowski

The results are in! Amazon has just released their much-anticipated list of the best books of 2024. Whether you are searching for your next book club, read, or the perfect holiday gift for your favourite reader, the Amazon Book Review Editors have compiled their best book list of 2024. From poignant debut novels to the latest from our most beloved novelists, from thrillers to mystery to historical fiction and romance novels, you will want to check out each of these titles.

Lending a Kindle Book to a family or friend has been pretty simple with the Kindle Lending Library, launched in 2011. However, the program was discontinued on January 4th, 2021. This 10-year-old program was popular in the early years of the Kindle but waned when Prime Reading was launched in 2016. What are the other ways you can share Kindle books in 2024? The only way to share Kindle e-books in 2024 is to set up a Family Library using a feature called Amazon Household. The feature can only be shared with the same family: two adults and four kids.

A new School year begins in March of 2025, and the South Korean government announced that it is scaling back on its plans to implement AI-driven digital textbooks for the classroom. The digital conversion of paper-based books for mathematics, English and informatics courses will go ahead as planned for third- and fourth-grade students, seventh-graders and first-year high school students. However, implementing AI-powered digital social studies and science textbooks will be pushed back for a year. These will be applied in classrooms in 2027. Also, Korean language, technology, and home economics textbooks will not be part of the conversion. The Ministry

Spotify for Authors is a new system that provides publishers and authors with insights and analytics to help them better understand their audiences and catalogue consumption on Spotify. The platform also offers promotional tools to help publishers enhance their presence on Spotify and expand their listener bases. Spotify for Authors replaces Spotify for Artists and Spotify for Creators. With the analytics, authors and publishers will gain insights into the aggregated ages and gender demographics of their listeners and use marketing tools like redemption codes to share royalty-free copies. Spotify will also provide promo cards offering assets designed for sharing across

Amazon has a system that has been around for a few years and usually is under the radar. It is called 'We Want You To Know.' This message is underneath the main bullet points of a product. They developed this with their own devices in mind and are ducking from all negative reviews for specific hardware and accessories, such as the Kindle Colorsoft. Colorsoft received the message, 'A small number of customers have reported a yellow band along the bottom of the display. We take the quality of our products seriously—customers who notice this can reach out to our customer

The owner of TikTok, ByteDance, will publish print books available in US bookstores next year. The company already publishes ebooks through its imprint, 8th Note Press. ByteDance will primarily publish genres popular on BookTok, where users share book recommendations. These include romance, contemporary fiction, young adult, and romance. The expansion comes as TikTok continues to drive unprecedented growth in print book sales. According to the New York Times, print sales for authors with large BookTok followings reached 41 million units in 2024, representing a 23% increase compared to last year. That growth significantly outpaces the broader adult fiction market, which

Apple News is a great way to stay informed about breaking news stories worldwide. There is a lot of free content, and you can manually enter your favourite websites, so your feed is full of appealing articles. Apple is starting to populate the free tier of Apple News with direct advertisements, and they are also reaching out to major brands to encourage them to advertise. According to Axios, 'Apple has been selling its ad inventory in search and within its App Store for some time. Previously, it relied on third-party vendors to sell Apple News ads, limiting its revenue potential

The Chinese digital book publishing industry is growing. Audiobooks and ebooks are taking off in a big way. A new report proclaims that the entire digital publishing industry earned an estimated 1.6 trillion yuan ($229 billion) in revenue last year, up 19% from 2022. One of the growth sectors is internet periodicals, e-books and digital newspapers, generating a combined income of 11.3 billion yuan in 2023, an 8.56% year-on-year increase. In recent years, the role of different book sales channels in China has evolved. Online stores have become the primary book sales channel, dominated by e-commerce platforms such as JD.com,

WEBTOON has just announced “Webcomic Legends,” a new contest launching in 2025 that will seek out the next wave of visionary webcomic creators -- with over USD 1 million in prizes. The contest will highlight emerging talent on WEBTOON’s CANVAS platform, rewarding 40 outstanding webcomics across multiple genres with cash prizes and the opportunity to join the WEBTOON Originals program. Launching in March 2025, creators worldwide can submit to “Webcomic Legends” on WEBTOON’s English language CANVAS platform. Future legends can submit stories across four genre categories: Most Epic (Action/Fantasy), Most Feels (Romance/Drama), Most Laughs (Comedy/Slice of Life), and Most Gripping

In school, laptops are the primary method for taking notes by typing. Few people take notes by hand anymore, but this has changed significantly in the past few years with the emergence of e-notebooks like the Kindle Scribe, Kobo Libra/Sage, Remarkable, and Boox devices. What is the best way for students to study and retain knowledge? A study published in the Association of Psychological Science found surprising results when comparing students’ abilities to comprehend and retain information presented in a lecture while typing notes on a laptop versus writing longhand. The longhand note-takers understood the information better and could recall