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Author J.K. Rowling has joined the 21st century on her own special terms. One of the world's most famous digital holdouts, Rowling announced Thursday that a new interactive website ...

Harry Potter battled the forces of evil and now is set to conquer the web - coming to e-books in a groundbreaking deal that has delighted fans but alarmed the book industry that helped make creator J.K. Rowling a billionaire.

Last week, a consortium of Dutch publishers unveiled the so called “delay app”, which allows the reader to choose a story to read while waiting. It allows the user to chose a story from a well-known Dutch author to match the time you spent waiting, from 5 to 60 minutes. It still has some issues: the app contains a certain amount of stories so no new content can be added and it is only for the iPad and iphone.

Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday said that, after less than four years of selling electronic books, it's now selling more of them than printed books. The online retailer said that since April 1, it has sold 105 e-books for every 100 printed books, including printed books for which there is no electronic edition. The comparison excludes free e-books, which would tip the scales further if they were included.

In January and February, she e-published a trilogy of young-adult novels she’d written years earlier. She called the first one “Seattle Girl” and chose a new author name, Lucy Kevin, to distinguish it from the sexually explicit Andre books. Here’s what her first quarter looked like: 56,008 books sold; income, $116,264.

Random House, a unit of Bertelsmann, is buying Smashing Ideas, a digital firm that creates book apps.

Amazon.com said it will allow readers to borrow Kindle books free at more than 11,000 U.S. libraries, a new twist in the growing battle for market share among electronic tablet makers.

Amanda Hocking, the 26-year-old author who shot to fame by selling more than a million copies of her self-published books, has signed up with a traditional publisher for her next series.St. Martin’s Press, part of Macmillan, will publish Ms. Hocking’s “Watersong” series, four books in the young-adult paranormal genre.A heated auction for the rights to publish her books began early last week, and several major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins, dropped out as the price climbed into the seven figures.

A few weeks ago, John Barber of the Globe and Mail wrote an interesting piece about the rise of ebook lending, both between friends and through libraries. “The increased demand is tremendous, it’s really remarkable,” Vickery Bowles, director of collections at the Toronto Public Library, told Barber.

One month after Amazon announced that its third-generation Kindle "eclipsed 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' as the bestselling product in Amazon’s history," CEO Jeff Bezos announces: "Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com."