Book Distribution

Amazon calls Edan Lepucki's new book California one of the "best books of July," but the highly anticipated novel about a post-apocalyptic world has been caught in a real-life battle. Lepucki finds herself in the cross fire between Amazon and her publishing house Hachette, which have been in a contract dispute for months now. As a bargaining tactic, Amazon has been delaying shipments of some books, and in the case of Lepucki, refusing to make the title available for pre-order.

Citing a lack of funding from outside the book industry, World Book Night U.S. is suspending operations.

Executive director Carl Lennertz said, "This has been a remarkable, passionate undertaking, and it has been a success by all measures, except for one: outside funding. For three years, the publishing industry and book community have very generously footed the bill and contributed enormous time and effort, and my gratitude for all of that is immeasurable. For us here at World Book Night, this experience has been life-changing

Brick-and-mortar book stores have clearly been on the decline for a while -- just look at Barnes & Noble's rocky finances. However, there's now some tangible evidence that the pendulum has swung in favor of internet-based sales. BookStats estimates that US publishers made more money from online orders and e-books in 2013 ($7.54 billion) than they did from old-fashioned physical retail ($7.12 billion). While the difference isn't huge, it suggests that a large chunk of the American population is content with buying books that it hasn't seen in person.

French lawmakers adopted a bill on Thursday that will prevent Amazon and other online giants from offering free deliveries of discounted books, in a bid to support the country's small bookshops.

The Senate gave its approval for the bill, which had already been unanimously backed in the lower house National Assembly, and it is expected to be signed into law by President Francois Hollande within the next two weeks.

The bill bans online giants such as Amazon from delivering books without charge, but still allows them to set discounts of up to five percent

British authors have condemned as "deeply worrying" reports that Amazon is now pressing for improved terms from publishers in the UK, as its showdown with Hachette in the US continues to be played out in public.

According to book industry bible the Bookseller, to whom UK publishers spoke on condition of anonymity, Amazon is putting publishers under "heavy pressure" to introduce new terms. The Bookseller reports that these include the proviso that "should a book be out of stock from the publisher, Amazon would be entitled to supply its own copies to customers

In the New York Times coverage, for example, the fact that hundreds of indie publishers were part of the deal doesn’t show up until — well, it doesn’t really show up at all. The fact that Perseus even had a “distribution arm” doesn’t appear until paragraph seven, but you’d have to know what “distribution arm” meant to really get it, and even then it only merits half a sentence: “Under the terms of the deal, Hachette would keep the Perseus publishing business,

In this webinar, you will hear from industry leaders about: Critical market trends, and on-demand and digital technologies.

Although it has now been surpassed by the United States, Japan was once the world's largest market for e-books, thanks to the early success of the cellphone-content business. But in today's competitive market, e-book sellers disappear every few months, leaving consumers to wonder whether the digital products they are buying are as permanent as paper books.

Japan has many platforms that sell e-books, run by distributors, cellphone carriers, electrical-goods retailers and so on. When you consider Japan's literacy rate, long train-commute times that afford time for reading,

BiblioNasium, the fastest growing COPPA compliant, social reading network for young readers, is announcing the launch of new features that support multi-media content and tools for presenting stories and books to its audience of kids, their parents and educators.

Biblioboard is an ebook lending platform for libraries. Compared to Netflix by USA Today, the platform gives users instant access to library ebooks via web and mobile channels, enabling libraries to compete in an increasingly digital world. CEO Andrew Roskill describes below what sets BiblioBoard apart from other digital library solutions and how libraries and publishers alike can benefit.