Macmillan Publishing Solutions

Earlier this year, I read an article that recommended that all publishers should be selling direct to consumer not only to garner sales, but to build a direct relationship with customers. Indeed, on the face of it, this argument makes sense. But, while I see the argument for going direct, the largest obstacle publishers need to overcome in order to sell directly from their website is convincing readers to adapt their buying habits, a difficult proposition given the success of the status quo.

The reality is that book buying isn't broken.

May 4th, 2015 (Vancouver, BC) - Today, BitLit announces a new partnership with New York-based publisher, Macmillan, to offer ebook bundles. Readers who own Tor/Forge books, as well as select titles from other Macmillan imprints, will now be able to use the BitLit app to download ebooks of their print books for only $2.99. The offer includes bestsellers like Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson, and Lock In by John Scalzi.

is is an appropriate time to consider the power of Penguin Random House's position in the marketplace. It is very strong. If I were any of the other four major publishers, I would fear PRH more than Amazon as a potential disruptor of my business. When I put that proposition to a UK-based executive of one of those companies at the London Book Fair last week, he readily agreed with me.

When one considers what a segmented business publishing is, the Penguin Random House combination becomes that much more eye-catching.

With the latest deal wrapped, Amazon appears to have reached a truce, of sorts, with the publishing industry. Since last fall, the e-commerce giant has successfully renegotiated contracts with four of the five big publishers-Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. The terms of all the contracts, per the New York Times, let the publishers decide their own e-book prices, but also gave them financial incentives to keep those prices low. Arrangements that give the publisher complete control over e-book prices are known in the industry as "full agency" models.

A month after announcing its partnership with Shanghai-based Tencent Literature, Boston-based distribution and e-book-discovery start-up Trajectory Inc. has opened a suite of additional agreements pertaining to a new relationship with the major Chinese corporation Xiaomi.

The new deals include Macmillan, MIT Press, and UK wholesale distributor Gardners Books.

Trajectory is positioning itself as a bridge to such major Chinese retailers as Tencent and Xiaomi, for publishers in the West to use in getting their books into China's marketplace. A key to Trajectory's operation in this role is its Natural Language Processing Engine

HarperCollins has signed a deal with Amazon to sell its books, much like the contracts the online bookseller has reached with other publishers. Relations between Amazon and the New York publishers, always rather fraught, worsened last year when the bookseller and the publisher Hachette had a multimonth conflict over the price of e-books.

Amazon discouraged sales of Hachette books to pressure the publisher, and Hachette's writers and their allies took to the barricades. The impasse was broken when Amazon signed a contract with Simon & Schuster in October and then used the same terms

Yesterday, the company announced it would be opening an ebookstore, featuring titles from existing clients and the two Big 5 holdouts, Hachette and Penguin Random House. The ebook subscription-which earned the company the moniker 'The Netflix for Books"-remains the company's core identity, but the store is a major development, especially because it's open to non-subscribers. (Melville House books are available for purchase because-final full disclosure-we are distributed by PRH.) While the "ebookstore" (which is a bad word, by the way) element of this story has gotten the most play in the media

When I reported on the story on Tuesday, I knew little more than that the negotiations had hit a snag.  The original BI article didn't include any direct quotes, just unnamed sources, but it was later updated to include this statement from Amazon:

I can't comment on that rumor. I can say that we have offered Harper the same terms for a contract that Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan have all recently agreed to.

I can also add that Publishers Lunch said that the contract negotiation had been going on for over a year.

The contract between "Big Five" book publisher HarperCollins and Amazon is about to expire, and HarperCollins is refusing to sign an agreement with the new terms that Amazon is asking, a source with knowledge of the situation tells Business Insider. 

The contract presented to HarperCollins was the same contract recently signed by Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan, Amazon confirmed.

If HarperCollins and Amazon don't come to an agreement, no print or digital HarperCollins books will be available on Amazon once its existing contract runs out "very soon," our source says. 

Oyster, a Netflix-style service for e-books, has brought on its first chief financial officer, Jeannie Mun.

Before joining Oyster, Mun spent a lot of time in the ad world, having recently served as CFO at ad company MediaMath, and before that working as vice president of finance and strategy at ad software company Operative.

So why join an e-book startup? Mun said she was starting to think about "the next stage of my career," and after meeting with Oyster CEO Eric Stromberg, she became "more and more excited" about finding a role that combined her experience