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How Amazon Came to Dominate Fiction in Translation
December 11, 2015 at 2:09 pm

The unwillingness of English-speaking readers to engage with fiction in translation has come in for its fair share of criticism over the years, not least from the director of the Edinburgh book festival, Nick Barley, who described the UK’s parochial reading habits as “something of an embarrassment” this summer. Help, however, might be at hand…

How Amazon’s Long Game Yielded a Retail Juggernaut
November 19, 2015 at 2:27 pm

To study the graph of Amazon’s stock performance in 2015 is to witness a series of stepwise lurches toward commanding new heights. Over all, the stock market has been flat this year, and technology companies, as a group, haven’t fared much better. Then there’s Amazon, which slipped the atmosphere. Shares of Jeff Bezos’s company have…

The Past, Present and Future of the Printed Book
November 10, 2015 at 2:33 pm

Hear that? That’s the sound of Johannes Gutenberg rolling in his grave. Amazon, the very company that has done the most to disrupt the industry surrounding the printing press, has opened a physical bookstore. Dustin Kurtz over at New Republic has a great review of what the company is billing as a “brick-and-mortar store without…

Amazon Posts an Unexpected Profit, and its Shares Soar
October 23, 2015 at 2:20 pm

Amazon is selling a lot of things to a lot of people, and is even managing to carve out a little profit in the process. The Seattle-based e-commerce, computing and entertainment company reported on Thursday that it made $79 million in the third quarter, or 17 cents a share. That is pocket change, considering the…

3 Reasons Amazon is Losing the Plot in India
October 12, 2015 at 2:25 pm

Back in 1994, Amazon set out to become “the world’s largest bookseller,” making books from all over the world available a mouse click away. And they did it, quickly expanding into additional product categories, selling everything from car parts to condoms. Jeff Bezos’ juggernaut soon galloped through U.S. and out into the world, setting up…

To Defy Amazon, Kinokuniya Plans to Monopolize More Titles
October 5, 2015 at 12:15 pm

In the wake of the positive response to its direct purchase of Haruki Murakami’s latest book, asiaone.com reports that the Japanese bookstore chain Kinokuniya “plans to increase direct purchases of books from publishers – as opposed to the conventional practice of buying them through wholesale booksellers.” As we reported last month, Kinokuniya purchased 90,000 copies…

German Booksellers Seek Action on Amazon Audiobooks
September 22, 2015 at 2:04 pm

The association of German book sellers accused Amazon and its subsidiary Audible on Monday of building a monopoly in the audio book business as it lodged complaints with the German competition authority and the European Commission. The association said in a statement that Amazon and Audible were abusing their dominant market position to force publishers…

Amazon Has 6 New Devices—And an Actual Plan for Hardware
September 18, 2015 at 2:26 pm

Amazon announced six new devices this morning—and not one of them is a phone. In fact, all six are staunchly not the kind of do-everything device the company attempted with the Fire Phone. With four tablets and two set-top boxes, Amazon made a single statement: We win at entertainment. You want to draw, futz with…

Could Amazon Exclusivity Be Good for the Future of Ebooks?
September 15, 2015 at 2:54 pm

Here’s an argument we don’t hear frequently for the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select programs. "I’m ensuring the best possible reader experience with ebooks." This is the soon-to-be-seafaring author Hugh Howey, who says that there’s something more important than the doubling of his overall income since Amazon instituted per-page payouts for its Kindle Select programs…

The Murakami Offensive: Is This How Bookstores Beat Amazon?
September 4, 2015 at 12:27 pm

In a bid to outmaneuver Amazon, Kinokuniya, Japan’s largest bookstore chain, recently bought 90% of the first print run of Haruki Murakami’s new book Novelist as a Vocation, a collection of essays the author wrote for Monkey, a Japanese literary magazine. The book arrives in stores on September…