At $79.00 per annum, Amazon Prime earlier offered unlimited two-day shipping for all Amazon-inventoried items, and $3.99 for overnight shipping. However, now, at the unbelievably same cost, they also offer access to thousands of streaming TV show episodes and movies for free, and can download one free Kindle book per month through the Lending Library program also.

Each time, a book is borrowed from an Amazon Prime member, the publishers make around $1 which serves as a very nice bonus to those independent publishers whose books don’t cost beyond $5. This amount of $1 accounts for nearly an entire royalty on a book purchase, and as expected, it is those independent publishers who are the most excited about this. Off late, more than one million independently published books have been checked out from the Lending Library.

This week, AAP (Association of American Publishers) and international alliance of book publishing houses took legal action against two sites library.nu and ifile.it as they were found guilty of ebook piracy. In Ireland, these sites had to serve court orders where they were located after a seven month identification and enforcement process as part of an eBook anti-piracy drive.

Up to 17 publishing firms requested for injunctions for around 170 books before a regional court of Munich, Germany.

The publishers said that the site “Library.nu” acquired more than 400,000 copyrighted ebooks and made them publically available to the readers for free. They allowed anonymous downloading by disguising themselves as legitimate ebook providers and alluded to serving as an authorized library for such content. It was also highlighted that this site made an annual income of €8m annually ($10,602,400) by letting out advertising space to third agencies and also through donation to the “internet library” through online payment services.

As a result of this, library.nu were made to “voluntarily” shut down its site, and iFile.it is still running but has disabled uploading for anonymous users.

Even after the success of the enforcement action, Tom Allen, President and CEO, AAP stated “While this action is a significant step in shutting down two major rogue websites stealing content from publishers and others, it also captures the enormous investment of time and cost required for rights-holders to protect their work.”

Praising the high profile anti-piracy web censoring US bill

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act), Allen continued: “For every rogue site that is taken down, there are hundreds more demanding similar effort. I can’t think of a timelier example of the need for additional tools to expedite such action.”This is a part of worldwide crackdown on sites involved in piracy. This includes sites like the high profile closure of Megaupload website last month and the shutdown of the music website music website

RnBXclusive.com this week.

Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller uncovered Apple’s plans of launching a free application named the Ibooks 2 which has a great video and animation features that makes for an extremely interactive and digital reading experience.

To help authors create and publish their own digital textbooks, Apple also announced a new free software application for Macintosh computers named the iBooks Author.

Apple is widening its iTunes U program beyond its normal audio and video features by adding app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch that enables lecturers and professors in creating a full fledged online course apart from preparing assignments, books, quizzes and syllabi. This feature was earlier an option only for the higher-education schools, but now they have expanded even to the K-12 schools as well.

Apple hopes that the students find this new form of textbooks more engrossing and are further encouraged to study. Students studying biology for example can view a cell’s 3D image with the help of this app. They can tap a word for a glossary definition and drag their finger to highlight a passage. All the content can be regularly updated and these textbooks can automatically turn student notes into study cards.

Apple is expanding its wings into a more complex and competitive industry in which publishers, book distributors and start-ups are also pitching their digital platforms for reading ebooks and exploring the textbook supplements like quizzes, animations, and social networking tools.

There are other lesser knows companies as well, apart from Apple to explore this field – including Area start-ups Kno and Inkling.

One of the statements by Schiller to media’s questions is “No one is saying technology is the only part of the solution, but it is a key piece of the solution. It can enable the teacher to have tools to excite kids that are otherwise hard to reach.”

Apple’s priority for now, though they plan to explore any grade level, would still be to focus more on the higher graders since their textbook content is more comprehensive and complicated, they would cost around $ 14.99 or less. Early publishing partners include Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which collectively control 90 % of the market, with some titles available immediately. The CIO and Director of Digital Strategy Genevieve Shore, Pearson says “Although we kind of use the metaphor of the book to describe what these products are, they’re not really books at all. It’s hard to do comparisons. One of the books we have has 50 hours of video in it, so that’s a completely new set of interesting material that students have never had before.”

Apple is also trying to partner up with DK Publishing on titles that include dinosaurs, insects, mammals and the ABCs. One of the famous book “Life on Earth” by biologist E. O. Wilson is also being made available by providing the first two chapters free of cost and rest 39 chapters spanning up to 24 months at a much higher price.

The director of technology, marketing and communications for South Kent School, a private boarding school for 9th through 12 graders in South Kent, Conn Mr. Gonzalo Garcia is also fascinated by the low prices of this app, he says “The thing that got me was the $ 15 {price tag}. I thought ads were going to pop up all of sudden.” The school’s students by and large prefer e-books from Inkling, a Silicon Valley startup that directly works with authors to reconstruct their content, including video, audio, a social networking feature for communicating with other students, and 3-D graphics that can be manipulated with finger strokes.

Schiller acknowledges competition. But goes on to say “no one has been successful (or) has created a platform for digital education content that has had great widespread adoption and made a difference. We think Apple is uniquely positioned to possibly be the first to make this work.”

Though certain features like iTunes come as Apple’s free app, it continues to collect its regular 30% on the sale of its ebooks. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services states “”I wouldn’t put a lot of emphasis on the business component of this. This is not a big profit center from the company point of view. And the majority of what we’re doing is free.”

DK’s deputy CEO John Duhigg says “From our point of view we are very agnostic (and) want to put our products out on every platform. For us what the Apple platform delivers in terms of the consumer experience that makes a difference. We work with pretty much anybody that will work with us.”

However, questions continue to rise regarding how quickly this can be adopted and made available. During his presentation, Schiller did not state as to many textbooks will be made available. Apple claims that there are already 1.5 iPads already in use through various educational institutes but comparatively few students use the iPad as they are priced as much as $499 per device. They are launching few chapters initially making more available as the semesters complete and new ones are underway.

“I find (the timing) very curious,” says Jeff Sherwood, CEO of Bigwords.com, an eTextbook price comparison site. “Obviously you would want to launch for back to school.”

Sherwood talks about his analysis, stating that most etextbooks cost around 10% below price list that can exceed up to $150. He says “I need to see what the catalog looks like. If Apple can you give a $ 150 book for $ 15, that would be pretty cool.”

Ross Rublin, an NDP analyst tweeted, “Much as with other printed content, textbook publishers will have to justify investment to add all this multimedia in Apple textbooks.” McGraw-Hill CEO Harold (Terry) McGraw III says Apple has “turbocharged the process.” and believes that the $14.99 pricing model can work. He states that “In the online world your paper, binding, printing, warehousing (costs) go away. So you can pass that along and through the volume increases you’ll do very well.” He also goes on to add that “you can’t replace content and curriculum and pedagogy. We’ve got a different platform now than a textbook to do that. Everybody wins.”

With the promise of support for MAC computers coming soon, Amazon launched this free down application for all PC users.

People who use Kindle have always had this advantage of being able to transfer personal documents to their devices by either emailing them to an email id assigned to their Kindle account or attaching the ereader to a PC and dragging the files over. This process is further simplified with this new feature “Send to Kindle”.

Users can transfer various file types like PDF, .doc, .rft or .txt files. Image files like .jpg, .pmg, .bmp can also be sent. With this Send to Kindle application, users can archive personal documents to their Kindle Library in the Amazon Cloud and re-download them later to a Kindle device or Kindle App for iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch when connected wirelessly.

Amazon, in their blogspot quoted that “Your last page read along with bookmarks, notes and highlights are automatically synchronized for your documents (with the exception of PDFs) across your Kindle devices and supported Kindle reading apps.”

In the meanwhile, earlier this week, Amazon launched a Kindle store for the ipad website that enables the ipad users to buy the Kindle books from their Safari browser.

You can loan out your Kindle books using the internet which allows your friend to go through all the book names in your device on their device. Though not all books can be loaned out through the Kindle e-reader, those books that are available to be loaned can be shared for a stretch of 14 days free of charge. Post these 14 days, books are automatically returned back to the owner and you need not track your book back on your device.

Check your bookshelf.

To find out if the book in your device can be given to others or not, you can check your personal virtual bookshelf Amazon’s website and going to the Manage Your Kindle page within the Orders section. If you have the option of lending a particular book, you will see a small caption “Loan This Title option” under the Actions drop down menu to the far right of the book’s name.

From this website, you can also access the same options from the book’s product page. Books in your device that can be lent will show a on the screen top which contains the date when the book was bought along with a link where you can go ahead with the lending procedure.

How-to guides, news, etc from the book’s product page will help you to in many ways using the technology.

If you have a lot of book friends and are passionate about lending books, you can check if the book can be lent or not before purchasing the book on Amazon. If that book can be shared, it will have Lending: Enabled listed among the Product Details below the book’s Language and ASIN number information.

How to pass on the ebooks:

Now that you know that your book can be lent, click on the option “Loan This Title” which will bring up a form on the screen where you will have to fill up with the borrower’s information like their name, email id, any other personal message, etc.

Once this done, the borrower will receive an email letting them know that the book has been lent to them. They will get up to 7 days to accept which is done by clicking the link within the email, and an additional 14 days to complete reading and sending it back to the owner. When the borrower accepts the book, it is saved in the recipient’s Amazon account from where the book can be accessed with a Kindle, computer or any other device that runs the Kindle application.

Just like lending out a normal book, the Kindle ebook is also not available for you to read once it is lent out. The title shows up as “unavailable” until the borrower gives it back to you or till the expiry of the loan period.

If you do not find anything interesting on your friend’s Kindle device, there are many other public libraries that lend you the book of your choice and are likely to have a much broader collection as well. Amazon also offers a number of free titles to download and read; besides Amazon Prime members can borrow one title from Amazon’s lending library per month for no additional charge.