At Inkmesh we follow developments in the ebook industry with rabid passion, and given how quickly the space is evolving, there’s always something new to discuss. So we thought it would be a good idea to summarize every week’s most important ebook news items on this blog, and starting today, we will have a post titled ‘Ebooks This Week’ every Sunday. Here is this week’s edition:

Stephen Covey granted Amazon exclusive ebook rights to two of his books, including the top-selling ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’. In return for the exclusive deal that lasts a year, Amazon promised to market his ebooks aggressively and give him a much higher percentage of ebook sales. Simon & Schuster, the print publisher for these books, declined to comment on the deal but asserted ownership of ebook rights to all titles in their catalog. In a related development, Random House claimed retroactive ebook rights in a letter to literary agents, and were promptly snubbed by the Authors Guild.

Canadian ebook retailer Shortcovers relaunched as Kobo and announced a CAD $16 million investment from Borders USA and founding and majority shareholder Indigo, among others. Borders simultaneously announced plans to launch a Kobo-powerd ebookstore on borders.com next year, with a new eink device possibly in the works. Borders currently sells Sony Readers in their retail stores.

IDPF, the trade & standards association for digital publishing and the developer of the ePub standard announced election results for Board of Director positions including the role of president. George Kerscher, secretary general of the DAISY consortium, replaces Steve Potash of Overdrive as the new president. The new board consists of executives from several key organizations including Adobe, Random House, Harlequin, Internet Archive and O’Reilly Media. Amazon is notably missing from the IDPF’s current member list.

Google put up the first set of publications guidelines for Google Editions – the ebook store they plan to launch in 2010. Like Amazon, Google ‘reserved the right to sell a book at a price discounted from its list price’, indicating their plan to compete with Amazon and others on ebook prices. Google Editions purchases will be tied to a Google account and will be accessible through a web browser which will cache a copy of the ebook for offline reading. It is not clear if dedicated reading devices will be supported. Google will also offer the choice of securing ebooks with Adobe’s ACS4 DRM.

Amazon released the Kindle iPhone application in more than 60 countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom. The application was previously available only in the United States. A new version of Stanza, a popular iPhone reading application, was also made available in the app store this week. Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, was acquired by Amazon earlier this year.

Sony announced a partnership with News Corp to make the Wall Street Journal available on the Sony Reader, including the new Daily Edition which features wireless access and a touch screen. Additionally, a daily summary of news events will be available exclusively on Sony Readers. The Wall Street Journal is already available on the Kindle, but News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has previously expressed dissatisfaction with Amazon’s revenue splits for digital publications and their policy of not sharing subscriber names with content partners. Sony also announced partnerships with other content partners including the New York Times and Financial Times.

So that’s it for the first edition of Ebooks This Week. We would love to hear your comments below, on Twitter or on Facebook. Happy Holidays everyone!

If you’re using Firefox 2+ or IE 7+ (sadly, Safari refuses to be OpenSearch compatible), you can now use your browser’s search bar to find ebooks on Inkmesh. Search suggestions work too!

Click here to add Inkmesh to your browser’s list of search engines.

You can find more information about adding search engines to Firefox here and to Internet Explorer here. Go find something awesome!

It is a well-known fact that Amazon prices Kindle books aggressively, and publishers don’t exactly love them for it. At Inkmesh we wanted to find out exactly how aggressive Amazon’s ebook pricing really was, and how other big players in ebook retailing stacked up. We decided to dig into the database that powers our ebook search and price comparison engine, and found several things interesting enough to share.

For the purpose of this analysis, we looked at ebooks that were available at the US websites of all three retailers – Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony, and included all titles with a valid sales rank (Sony does not assign sales ranks beyond fifty, so we pulled in all Sony ebooks that had sales ranks at the other two). We ended up with 11,604 top-selling titles available at all three vendors, and ran our numbers on this set. For the purpose of comparison, we also pulled in prices for these ebooks from the other sites we index, including Lulu, Fictionwise and HarperCollins. Ebook prices and availability vary over time and geographical boundaries, so what we found reflects the state of things for US consumers in the last week of November 2009.

The first thing that stood out was Amazon’s dominance. Out of the 11,604 titles we looked at, Amazon’s prices were lower than everyone else for 3,263 ebooks, and they matched the lowest price elsewhere for another 5,329 ebooks. Which basically means that Amazon had the best prices on 8,592 (or 74%) of the top-selling ebooks in circulation today. And the price difference wasn’t insignificant either – for ebooks that were cheapest at Amazon, Kindle prices were lower than the next best price by 15% on average.

Barnes and Noble was a clear (and distant) number two – they beat everyone else’s prices (including Amazon’s) on only 463 titles, but matched the lowest price elsewhere on 4,837 titles. The prices confirmed how hard B&N is trying to upstage Amazon at their own game, but if B&N is looking to win on ebook prices, they probably need to try harder.

The most interesting finding, however, was Sony’s poor showing, indicating an apparent lack of willingness to compete on pricing. Perhaps things will change when they introduce their ePub store, but for now, if you have a Sony Reader, you’re much more likely to find better prices for Sony ebooks at stores like Lulu, Diesel, eBookMall and even publisher sites like HarperCollins, all of which had lower prices than Sony’s eBook Store on hundreds of Adobe Digital Editions books. Sony beat everyone else’s prices on only 18 ebooks (that’s right, eighteen out of over eleven thousand) and matched the lowest price on only 423. The only saving grace for Sony seems to be their reader’s ability to read DRM content purchased from other ebook stores, unlike the Kindle which can only read Amazon’s DRM (though millions of DRM-free ebooks are available for both the Sony and the Kindle on multiple sites).

Some other stats we found interesting:

• There were only 398 free ebooks in the top 11,604. Looking at the lowest available prices for all titles, the average price was $6.88, and the median was $6.39.
• The average ebook price at the big three: $6.05 at Amazon, $7.96 at B&N, and $8.77 at Sony.
• Lulu, who only recently began selling ePubs in their ebook store, emerged as a surprise third-place winner. They matched the lowest price on 2,251 ebooks and beat everyone else on another 181.
• Fictionwise, one of the oldest independent ebook retailers until recently (when they were acquired by Barnes & Noble) were nowhere near as competitive, with lower prices on less than 50 ebooks. They do have club rebates, but to keep things simple, we did not consider those prices for this analysis.

The one line version of everything above: when it comes to ebook pricing, Amazon is currently the clear winner, Barnes & Noble is a distant second, but Sony doesn’t even seem to be trying. The landscape will continue to change as newer ebook vendors like Lulu (and Google) attempt to lure readers away from established players, and retailers and publishers experiment with new pricing models. It will be interesting to see how the Nook performs in comparison to the Kindle, and if Sony’s Daily Edition can shake things up in 2010. We will continue to follow ebook market trends on this blog, and would love to hear your comments and questions about ebook pricing via email, twitter or in the comments below. Stay tuned, and Happy eReading!

Our blog is live! At Inkmesh we want to help you find new and interesting stuff to read, so we figured there’s no better way to start our blog than by recommending the National Book Awards Winners for 2009, announced on Wednesday. It comes as no surprise that the winners in all four categories are also available as ebooks, from multiple retailers and in several different formats:

• Fiction: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• Nonfiction: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles
• Poetry: Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop
• Young People’s Literature: Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip M. Hoose

The links above display the best price for each ebook, and link to Google Book Previews (if available in your location). Check them out, and get them while they’re hot!