Can a one-size-fits-all, low-price, consumer-dominated sales model support a diverse, innovative, challenging literary output?It is either an existential threat to intellectual freedom or a rustbelt media industry meeting its comeuppance at the hands of disruptive technology. The battle between the multibillion-dollar publisher Hachette (and now the Scandinavian publisher Bonnier) and the even more multibillion-dollar Amazon is usually discussed in high-minded tones, particularly by publishers and their authors. But at heart, it is merely another collision between producers and consumers that has a particular significance only if you ascribe a value to books as cultural artefacts. It is perfectly possible, instead of Hachette and Amazon, and the 900 writers who took out a two-page ad in the New York Times to protest, to substitute supermarkets, dairy farmers and the price of milk.Although books account for only 7% of the sales of the Everything store, Amazon sells a lot of them. In particular it has 60% of the ebook market. It believes a flat-rate sales price for new books and bestsellers delivers higher sales and bigger profits. Hachette disagrees. Amazon is forcing the issue by disadvantaging Hachette books (no buy button, no discounts and so on). Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2014-08-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Philip Jones Publication Date: Tue, 03/05/2011 - 11:42 E-book sales at Hachette UK quadrupled in the first quarter of 2011 and are more than 5% of HUKs trade sales, the company revealed today (3rd May), adding that it was beginning to catch up with the US, where ebooks now account... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Thu, 28/04/2011 - 15:15 Hodder Faith publishing director Wendy Grisham is moving to the US to launch new Hachette imprint Jericho Books. The imprint will be part of Faith Words, with Grisham appointed as publisher and vice-president reporting to... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Barnes & Nobles advertising campaign for the Nook Color, an e-reading tablet, features no company stores in the ads, a nod to changes in the publishing industry. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2011-04-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Amazon has tweaked its Kindle for Android app to run optimally on tablets running Android 3.0 Honeycomb. Continue reading at Editor & Publisher
[ Editor & Publisher | 2011-04-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Thu, 21/04/2011 - 10:29 Random House imprint Hammer has acquired the latest title by Orange-prize winner Helen Dunmore, in a special project for the Penguin author. Century and Arrow publisher Kate Elton bought UK and Commonwealth rights to The... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Anja Sieg Publication Date: Thu, 21/04/2011 - 13:53 More than three years after it was introduced in North America and eight months after the UK become the first country outside of the US to get a dedicated Kindle store, Germany has followed suit. The German Kindle store was... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Amazon just eliminated one of the biggest differences between the Kindle and competing e-readers. It said today it will be rolling out the Kindle Library Lending feature later this year, allowing customers to borrow books for free from more than 11,000 libraries in the U.S. Other e-readers and... Continue reading at AllThingsD
[ AllThingsD | 2011-04-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Benedicte Page Publication Date: Wed, 20/04/2011 - 15:13 Palazzo Editions will publish a "major" retrospective of the work of Steven Spielberg in August 2012, written in co-operation with the director. Steven Spielberg: A Retrospective will be written by film critic and documentary... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Mon, 18/04/2011 - 15:44 Police intelligence analyst Elizabeth Haynes has won the first Amazon Rising Stars award of 2011. The mother-of-one, who lives in Kent, came top in a consumer-review poll asking readers which one of four Amazon-selected... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Benedicte Page Publication Date: Mon, 18/04/2011 - 09:22 Amazon.co.uk has launched a two-week Kindle ebook promotion, with Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White priced £1.47. According to information sent to publishers whose books will feature, the campaign will be a... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Amazon is dropping the price of its Kindle e-reader to $114 as it faces increasing competition from Apple, Barnes & Noble and other tablets. The new price point represents a $25 price cut on the Wi-Fi version, but it comes with one major trade-off: ads. The e-reader will be sold by Amazon,... Continue reading at AllThingsD
[ AllThingsD | 2011-04-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Graeme Neill Publication Date: Fri, 08/04/2011 - 08:30 HarperCollins has hired agent Nick Canham to head up its sports list, as it makes a number of promotions in its non-fiction team. Canham joins from Roar Global and will also commission general non-fiction as editorial director.... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Bookseller Staff Publication Date: Mon, 04/04/2011 - 09:00 Amazon has emerged as the surprise underbidder on a multi-million dollar auction for a self-published author, the first time the retailer is believed to have bid on frontlist. read more Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Thu, 24/03/2011 - 15:50 Jean M Auel's new Earth's Children title is Amazon.co.uk's most pre-ordered book of 2011. The Land of Painted Caves: Earth's Children 6 (Hodder & Stoughton), is the last in the Earth's Children series. It will be published... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-03-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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With the recent reports from Bloomberg News that Android is one of the fastest operating systems currently on the market, it is no surprise that the system has introduced a new appstore in partnership with Amazon.com, Inc., which launched on Tuesday. "Custome Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2011-03-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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As convenient as they are, I've long worried about the many ways in which ebook purveyors restrict readers' rights. You can't resell the books you purchase for the Amazon Kindle, and you can't read them on most other e-readers. We also don't really own ebooks in the same way we own... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2011-03-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Publication Date: Wed, 23/03/2011 - 07:50 Writer, journalist and editor Peter Forbes' exploration of mimicry and camouflage in nature, art and warfare has been awarded the £50,000 Warwick Prize for Writing. His Dazzled and Deceived (Yale University Press) was described by chair of judges... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-03-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Barbara Casassus Publication Date: Tue, 22/03/2011 - 16:45 Hachette Livre and the French National Library (BnF) have signed a print-on-demand agreement for the publisher to sell through bookshops out-of-copyright works from the BnFs online library Gallica. An initial 15,000 titles... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-03-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Barbara Casassus Publication Date: Mon, 21/03/2011 - 11:26 E-book sales by Hachette Livre in the United States are in line with the national average, according to the group's chairman and c.e.o. Arnaud Nourry. He told the Buzz Média service of the French daily Le Figaro that ebooks... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-03-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Thu, 17/03/2011 - 15:57 Luke Johnson, best known in the book trade for his spell owning Borders, and fellow Financial Times journalist Mrs Moneypenny are writing business titles for Penguin's business imprint Portfolio. read more Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-03-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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