In time for the back-to-school season, Google (s GOOG) will start selling and renting digital textbooks through the Play store in August, the company announced at a breakfast in San Francisco this morning.

The main point of the breakfast was two bigger announcements: The Chromecast, a $35 dongle that lets you stream internet video to your TV, and a new Nexus 7 tablet. Nonetheless, getting into the textbook market helps Google compete against Amazon (s AMZN), Barnes & Noble (s BKS) and Apple (s AAPL), all of whom have already entered the digital textbook space. In general, Google has struggled to gain ebook market share against those companies.

Google says it’s working with the five largest textbook publishers — Cengage, Wiley, Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Macmillan — and that students will be able to purchase digital textbooks or rent them for up to six months. It also said that prices…

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Hoopla wants to be a free Netflix for library users

25 July 2013 by particularkev

Gigaom

Hoopla wants to make borrowing material from a library as convenient as streaming content on the web. The company, launching to the public today after several months in beta, offers patrons of participating libraries access to on-demand streaming movies and TV shows, as well as audiobooks and music that can be streamed or downloaded. There’s no waiting, and patrons don’t have to remember to return the digital materials: After a set period of time, they expire. Titles can be streamed on Hoopla’s website or its iOS (s AAPL) and Android (s GOOG) apps.

The service launches at a time when libraries are increasingly making ebooks available to patrons. Seventy-six percent of U.S. public libraries offered access to ebooks in 2012. But offering access to other types of digital materials is still fairly new. It’s unclear how many users want them, but since Hoopla lets libraries pay per use, it…

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Is Flipboard a partner or a competitor for publishers and content creators? Yes

24 July 2013 by particularkev

Gigaom

Flipboard has always had a somewhat double-edged relationship with the publishers who create the bulk of the content that flows through its apps: it theoretically gets those content creators a larger audience, and in some cases it does revenue-sharing advertising deals with them, but it also keeps a lot of the benefit for itself. That tension between Flipboard’s interests and the interests of content companies or media outlets was highlighted again on Tuesday, with the news that the company has launched a web version of its platform, which allows Flipboard content to be viewed through any web browser.

In the beginning, Flipboard offered publishers what seemed like a sweet deal: a magazine-style app that would allow their content to look great on an iPad or other mobile device, which saved them the cost and hassle of developing their own apps and/or offered a possible alternative to them, a special…

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Flipboard launches its mobile magazines on the web

24 July 2013 by particularkev

Gigaom

Flipboard is making its custom magazines available on the web, the company announced Tuesday. Until now, the magazines, which Flipboard launched in March, were only available to read through Flipboard’s mobile apps.

Flipboard’s magazines feature lets users create magazines from content found through Flipboard’s apps and on the web, and it was a move toward turning Flipboard from a publisher-centric platform to a user-centric platform. Now, with Tuesday’s update, readers can access those custom magazines from their web browsers the way they do in apps, flipping the pages with the keyboard’s arrow keys or by swiping the trackpad. Below, for instance, is GigaOm’s Flipboard magazine “GigaOM Reads” on the web. You can browse through the magazines on the web here. Flipboard says that since March, readers have created over two million magazines.