Wirebound's Friday roundup of what's been going on in the world of publishing technology this week...

Barnes & Noble reassured customers that evidence PIN pad devices in its US stores had been tampered with had not affected purchases made using its website or Nook e-reader devices. An internal investigation of what the company described as "a sophisticated criminal effort to steal credit card information, debit card information and debit card PIN numbers" found that a single pad in each of 63 of nearly 700 stores across the country had been affected. It recommended however that customers who had swiped their card at any of the affected outlets should change their PIN numbers and review their accounts for unauthorised transactions.

The European Commission has ordered Luxembourg to close a loophole that allows Amazon to pay only 3 per cent VAT on e-books sold to British readers because it is registered there, rather than the UK rate of 20 per cent, The Guardian reported. Luxembourg has been given 30 days to increase its tax rate on digital services, which has attracted companies like Skype and Netflix to the country, to 15 per cent.



While the unveiling of Apple's iPad Mini attracted most press attention, Amazon went after a new market with the launch of its first Japanese language e-reader and a Japanese Kindle Store, as well as making its Kindle Fire devices available to Japanese buyers. The Paperwhite is being made available with Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi and 3G and will be one way of buying titles from the selection of 50,000 Japanese-language books at amazon.co.jp.

The American Library Association, eBay and the American Free Trade Association are among US businesses, academic organisations and pressure groups that have signed up with the Owners' Rights Intiative, a new coalition operating under the slogan 'You Bought It, You Own It!'. The group will lobby government on ongoing efforts to decide whether 'first sale' rights, which transfer the right of ownership and ability to resell goods including physical and electronic books from seller to buyer, extend to those manufactured overseas. Last year, John Wiley & Sons successfully sued a US student who had imported and resold foreign editions of its textbooks on the basis that first sale only applies to titles that have been 'lawfully made' in territories where the US Copyright Act is law.

Jacob Dahl at Wolfson College, Oxford is close to decoding proto-Elamite, the world's oldest undeciphered writing system. A reflectance transformation imaging that uses a combination of 76 separate photographic lights and computer processing allowed the researcher, based at the Ashmolean Museum's Oriental Studies Facility, to create detailed images of symbols cut into clay tablets around 5000 years ago in an area that is part of modern-day Iran.