Wal-Mart

For Amazon , it’s going to be hard to top 2011. After all, this was the year the gargantuan online retailer launched a cloud storage service, opened the doors on its own Appstore, and released a tablet, the Kindle Fire , that happens to be selling like crazy . Looking at the bigger picture, this was the year Amazon moved to unify its several disparate services into a full-fledged platform in its own right. The site — though it’s not just a site anymore, is it? — already has a massive user base, and now its

The Kindle Fire, Amazons heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. The most disgruntled are packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer. A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky. All the individual

Worthy Publishing announces expansion of the company’s publishing program through acquisition of specialty publisher Freeman-Smith.

If predictability is a qualification for success, I suggest to you that we are, as an industry, in for a bit of a roller coaster ride for the next several years.

Apple made headlines Tuesday by passing Exxon Mobil  to become the world's most valuable company in market capitalization, making a dramatic turnaround from being nearly broke years before. Now it's time to ask what company might be next in line to make a similar transformation.

At the moment, all indications point to Amazon, the company that began as an online bookseller but now is directly challenging Apple with its new Kindle Cloud Reader that bypasses Apple's App Store by offering books and other down-loadable content through the Web instead of a native iOS app.

The impending shutdown of Borders Group Inc. has spelled uncertainty for Canadian digital bookseller Kobo, whose partnership with Borders marked the chain’s too-little, too-late effort to cross over into the digital realm.

Borders was an early investor in Kobo and still holds an 11% stake in the Toronto-based company, which is also backed by majority shareholder Indigo Books & Music Inc., Cheung Kong Holdings and others.

Last October, just before the deal-making frenzy of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the indie publisher Johnny Temple received an e-mailed book proposal that he was tempted to brush off.

The project, “Go the ____ to Sleep,” by Adam Mansbach, was an irreverent and foulmouthed parody of a children’s book, written in rhymey verse with profanities sprinkled throughout, giving frustrated voice to a universal problem for parents of small and stubborn children.

"At first I didn't really take it seriously, because it's so unlike anything that we publish," said Mr. Temple, the publisher of Akashic Books

It has to be some kind of sign of the times that none of the expert presenters at the 8th Annual Making Information Pay conference of the Book Industry Study Group on May 5 bore the title of Publisher, Editor, Operations or Production executive.

Nonetheless, getting to the heart of the matter, “we can no longer go with gut instincts,” said Scott Lubeck, BISG Executive Director. … “Show me the data,” and we can point ourselves in the right direction.

An interesting article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, "As Big Boxes Shrink, They Also Rethink," described how the major discount stores and warehouse clubs are rethinking their business models and downsizing as people are buying more products online. Two examples are the Best Buy Mobile stores with a focus on smartphones, and the smaller stores that Wal-Mart is rolling out (40,000 square feet versus its 185,000-square-feet superstores).

Just in time for the holidays, U.S. shoppers now have another way to buy this season’s hottest new eReader. The Kobo Wireless eReader in Onyx, Lilac and Silver, is now available for purchase at Walmart.com, and is offered at $129 every day low pricing and comes with FREE shipping!