Random House Struik has launched the eGuide to Mammals of Southern Africa mobile app.

A new Natural History app, eGuide to Mammals of Southern Africa comes shortly after the release of another bestseller app Sasol eBirds of Southern Africa.

eGuide to Mammals is based on Struik Nature’s Field Guide to Mammals of Southern Africa, and offers interactive features that will enrich your wildlife experience.

App Features include:

• Each of the over 350 species found in the region has a detailed text description
• Most species have multiple hi-res photographs, distribution maps, animal-human size comparison, spoor drawings and skull photographs
• A few of the species also have audible calls
• Quickly find a species by looking up its track type, grouped with similar tracks
• A compare feature that lets you view two species at the same time on the same screen
• The ability to easily find a species using either common or scientific names and in taxonomic or alphabetic order
• A personal record of mammal sightings that can be exported to your storage card or email

Amazon has long played with tax loopholes in the US.

The "use tax" is to be paid by the purchaser either directly to the seller or to the tax administration. It represents roughly between 8 and 10% of each sale depending on the US State you live in. As an example, on a $100 sale the purchaser would need to pay an additional $10, making the bill $110.

In the past Amazon didn't charge their customers the tax and has been subject to various federal law suits. Their reasoning was inspired from a 1992 Supreme Court ruling stating that companies are only required to collect sales taxes from their customers when they have a presence in the state in which they reside. In Amazon's case, customers would be required to pay taxes where Amazon has set physical operations and warehouses. If you live in a state where Amazon has no physical facilities, you wouldn't pay the sales tax on purchases, giving Amazon the chance to be more competitive on prices compared to other national retailers.

Recently Amazon capitulated and began collecting tax money from their customers. Their reason? A change in strategy. Amazon's approach has always been to set up their distribution centres in low-cost states to deliver to high-cost rich states. For instance an order would be shipped to California from a warehouse in Kentucky.

Kobo is moving firmly into the number two position in international e-book retail (no prizes for guessing who is in first place), and being acquired by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten has added the financial muscle to accelerate this move.

Over the last year Kobo has launched local offerings in the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, and in July they entered two more major markets.

In conjunction with its parent company (Rakuten) Kobo launched its full e-reading offering in Japan on the 19^th July. This includes a fully localized Japanese experience including popular Japanese content (novels, essays, business and comic books) and authors in local currency.

In Italy Kobo has partnered with the Mondadori Group, Italy’s largest book retailer and publisher. The Kobo touch device will be available in 400 of Mondadori’s stores, and the publisher will also make 4,000 of its titles available to the overall 30,000 Italian e-books. The Italian e-book market is valued at close to 10 million Euro.

Kobo has also announced a self-publishing platform called Kobo Writing Life (KWL), which offers authors a range of tools, including live metrics of how and where their e-books are selling and the ability to manage pricing at a country level. KWL will launch in English, but localized language versions are already on the roadmap.

Kobo launched in December 2009 and now has more than 9 million registered users worldwide and a catalogue of over 2.5 million books, newspapers and magazines. Kobo is focused purely on e-reading and has launched many industry firsts such its social experience which includes Reading Life and Author Notes as well as e-book gifting. Kobo has customers in 190 countries.

Fifty Shades of Grey, the world's fastest-selling book, was originally a work of fan fiction published for free online. Based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, Fifty Shades (originally titled Master of the Universe) places ‘Bella’ and ‘Edward’ in a world of sexual submission and dominance, and has profited hugely from it.

Author EL James published the story in installments on FanFiction.net and received feedback and suggestions from fellow fan fiction authors, slowly building up a huge following of readers and fans [some might say ‘co-producers’] in the process. Fanfiction.net, the biggest online fan fiction community, has over 2.2 million members. The most popular ‘Fandom’ by far is Harry Potter, with almost 500 000 fan fiction stories.

James is not the first fan fiction author to successfully go ‘pro’. Among the list of commercially published fan fiction authors are Naomi Novik (Peter Jackson has signed on do the film version of her Temeraire series), Sarah Res Brennan (The Demon's Lexicon) and Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries).

In a blog post titled “Is Fan Fiction Ready to Go Mainstream?“ Alma Katsu makes the point that “While it is difficult to imagine another fan fiction-based book duplicating Fifty Shades’ heady success, it would be naïve to think that … others won’t try to follow in James’ footsteps.” Fanfic authors seem to agree: “If James can do it, what's to say the rest of us fanfic writers out there can't either, so long as we aren't blatantly plagiarizing someone else’s work?”.