Mark Coker of Smashwords became the leader of indie ebook writers--including some with dirty minds--in a fight against censorship and PayPal. He also has strong feelings about the DOJ's ebook pricing lawsuit.Mark Coker is the CEO of Smashwords, an ebook publishing and distribution platform. Coker recently won a highly publicized battle against PayPal, which briefly refused to work with Smashwords unless Coker removed certain naughty titles from the site. Fast Company caught up with Coker and learned, among other things, that writers of incest erotica can be very articulate.FAST COMPANY: What is Smashwords?MARK COKER: We’re probably the world’s largest distributor of self-published ebooks and ebooks from small independent presses. We were founded in 2008. A writer comes to Smashwords, uploads a Word document, which we instantly convert into multiple formats to be read on a Kindle or other device. Those are then available for sale at Smashwords.com at a price set by the author. 85% of all proceeds go to the author, so we flipped the compensation model upside-down. In traditional publishing, in the best case, an author earns 17.5% off an ebook’s list price. In 2008, we had 140 titles; in 2009, we had 6,000 titles; today we have just over 115,000.You recently came to prominence by picking a fight with PayPal, which threatened to stop working with you if you failed to remove some smutty titles from your store.On a Saturday, I received an email from PayPal notifying me I had... Continue reading at 'Fast Company'
[ Fast Company | 2012-04-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
'Becoming Steve Jobs,' Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s biography of the late Apple CEO, rose from the #8 spot to the #2 spot on Apple’s bestseller list for the week ended March 30. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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With "Downton Abbey" reviving interest in the period between the two world wars, the publishing arm of the British Library has been releasing new editions of forgotten classics published in Britain’s golden age of mystery (considered to span most of the 1920s and ’30s) since 2012. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2015-03-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Bloomsbury chief executive Nigel Newton has compared the state of publishing to the bus teetering half-way off a cliff edge at the end of the film "The Italian Job", on the opening day of the 30th International Publishers Congress in Bangkok (today, 24th March). But HarperCollins c.e.o. Brian... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-03-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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In the forthcoming book Becoming Steve Jobs, we learn just how close Tim Cook and Steve Jobs really were. Here, an exclusive excerpt: Fast Company executive editor Rick Tetzeli and co-author Brent Schlender's new book, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution Of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2015-03-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The latest book about Steve Jobs suggests the late Apple cofounder’s dislike of TV was one reason he terminated a 1990s personal computer called the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM).The expensive, short-lived machine was launched in March 1997, months before Jobs resumed leadership of the... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2015-03-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Amazon c.e.o. Jeff Bezos has admitted to making “billions of dollars of failures” at the company, and has said it does not matter. Speaking at Business Insider’s Ignition conference, Bezos also addressed the dispute the online retailer had with Hachette Book Group in the US, which has now been... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2014-12-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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'The Kindle is trying to reduce friction for reading a whole book, and it’s working,' Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at a conference yesterday. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2014-12-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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HarperCollins has signed a book exploring the golden age of crime writing by author Martin... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2014-08-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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There's no sign that Amazon and Hachette are close to burying their ebook hatchet, which has prompted the authors caught in the middle to speak up. One of those affected, Douglas Preston, penned an open letter to Jeff Bezos, requesting that he... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2014-08-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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David and Lesley Jacobs Solmonson, co-authors of 'The 12 Bottle Bar,' explain why home bartenders don't need to stock $60 bottles of obscure, unpronounceable liqueurs to make drinks worthy of the golden age of cocktails. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-08-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Around the turn of the 20th century—a golden age for libraries in America—the Snead Bookshelf Company of Louisville, Ky., developed a new system for large-stack library shelving. Snead’s multifloor stack systems can still be seen in many important libraries built in that era, for instance at... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2014-04-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Mabel Normand, who came to fame at Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios, was one of the top comedy stars of the silent era. Besides appearing in several shorts with Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle, Normand also wrote, produced and directed these slapstick comedies. She's the subject of "Mabel and... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2014-04-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The doom and gloom of the past few years appears to be over, with more publishing houses throwing open their doors to new writersBrigid Delaney Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-02-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. These wonder devices were not given to us from the mind of one man, but two. Now with Steve Jobs gone, Apple's most valuable asset is Jony Ive. Just how valuable? The company would have a hard time recovering if he left, says the man who wrote the book... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-11-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Bantam Press) has won... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2013-11-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Penguin Classics again breaks with publishing routine for ex-Smith, releasing glossy version of No 1 bestselling memoirHaving already bowed to Morrissey's demand that his autobiography be on an imprint usually reserved for the likes of Homer, Virgil and Henry James, Penguin Classics is set to... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2013-11-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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I’m grateful to MacKenzie and to every other thoughtful reviewer who shares their perspectives on my book and on this remarkable story. – Bloomberg Businessweek reporter and Jeff Bezos biographer Brad Stone, responding to a one-star review of his new book from MacKenzie Bezos, Jeff Bezos’s wife.... Continue reading at AllThingsD
[ AllThingsD | 2013-11-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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"I find way too many inaccuracies," MacKenzie Bezos writes in a critical Amazon.com review of a new book about the company her husband founded.The vast majority of the 45 Amazon.com customers who have reviewed Bloomberg Businessweek writer Brad Stone's new book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-11-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A pair of best-selling works by staff writers for The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright's "Going Clear" and George Packer's "The Unwinding," were among 10 books chosen for the nonfiction long-list of the National Book Awards.Besides Mr. Wright's investigation of Scientology and Packer's bleak account... Continue reading at Crains New York
[ Crains New York | 2013-09-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Seth Godin traces the ups and downs of the independent bookstore since WWII, while proclaiming that today is "a golden age for books," crediting Amazon. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2013-08-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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