News

Readers of Managing Your Medicare can now use the “check for updates” link from the CD packaged with the book to download updated information about Medicare in 2013. The updates in the download package (a 1mb ZIP file) include:

• Appeal steps for 2013
• A new worksheet for Medigap Standard Policies
• A new Part D Benefit Table
• A Part D Extra Help Benchmark Premiums by State list
• Six gender- and age-specific Prevention Tables
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Our marketing whiz, Tyler, developed this map to show the countries in which ebooks published by Self-Counsel Press have sold (this map is updated as we reach more countries):

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One of the more interesting challenges in producing ebooks is the file format question. On the surface, it looks pretty simple: two formats, EPUB and Amazon's Mobi dominate. Both (loosely speaking) use HTML tags and CSS stylesheets to determine how text and graphics are displayed. So an ebook is a collection of webpage-like pages in a container. Or is it?

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As 2012 draws to a close, a trend we are watching is the changing universe of devices used to read ebooks. A year ago, monochrome "e-ink" reading devices (such as the original Kindle) dominated the market. That dominance has eroded through 2012, and by the time Christmas sales are tallied I expect we will see a new leader.

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Back in August I said how pleased I was to report that we were starting to see sales of ebooks in countries outside Norrth America. The cost of shipping printed books has always been a major obstacle to sales outside North America, but ebooks change that.

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Looking at sales activity over the past half-year has reinforced my feeling that traditional book retailers are headed in a bad direction as they try to respond to the emergence of ebooks as a significant part of the business. Bad for them, and bad for us.

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We are very pleased to announce that all ebooks which are available on our website are now also available on Amazon.com as Kindle books. We expect them to appear on other, country specific Amazon sites very soon.

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In what seems like just a few short years, email has changed from being a blessing for quick communications to a productivity sapping monster. Why has this happened, and what can we do about it? I have found an approach that works for me. It might help you.

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Digital Rights Management, better known by its abbreviation, DRM, is the collective name for tools designed to prevent unauthorized copying of digital items. It has existed almost as long as consumer software: I recall that some software for my Apple ][ in 1980 had "copy protection" on the floppy disk.

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The reference everyone uses to answer questions like, "How many books are in print?" is Books in Print, a (subscription) database managed by Bowker. A look at the recent growth in the number of books available to be read is staggering.

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