Online Sales

Writing communities like Wattpad, Write On, and Widbook represent concentrated sources of writing talent, and Kobo is looking to tap in. Earlier this month Widbook and Kobo announced a new partnership which will enable Widbook members to sell ebooks through Kobo.

According to Widbook's blog post, premium members can sell their ebooks through Kobo with only a few clicks. The member simply has to set the price, title, description, and category, enter an ISBN (it's not provided), and the ebook can be automatically uploaded to Kobo and sold through Kobobooks.com and Kobo's retail partners in around the globe.

Barnes & Noble has made an investment in Flashnotes, an online marketplace where college students can buy and sell their notes from class. The deal, announced this morning, was made through the bookseller's Barnes & Noble Education unit, in advance of its expected spinoff of the division from the company. In a news releasing announcing the deal, the company said the investment reflects the education unit's broader plan "to pursue strategic opportunities in the growing educational services markets."

We knew it was coming.  We didn't know where, when, how, or why, but we knew Alibaba, the largest and most profitable e-commerce company in the world, and Amazon, the second largest, would inevitably come into direct contact with each other. And so it has come to pass.  Amazon, a company waging a losing battle to compete head to head with Alibaba in China, has seemingly declared "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". Today the Seattle based "Everything Store"  announced that it opened a consumer product presence on Alibaba's flagship business-to-consumer e-commerce platform, T-Mall. 

Amazon.com has opened an online presence on rival Alibaba's Tmall superstore, according to Reuters and other outlets citing an Alibaba spokesman. Amazon and Alibaba are both prodigious online retailers and rivals and both are eying the other's turf. Earlier this week Aliyun, Alibaba's online services arm, opened a cloud data center in Silicon Valley, its first presence in the U.S. Aliyun is seen as a competitor to cloud giant Amazon Web Services.

France and Luxembourg lost their battle to apply reduced VAT rates to ebooks on Thursday when a top European court agreed with EU regulators that only paper books qualified for lower taxes. EU rules allow member states to set lower rates of value-added tax on printed books but the European Commission decided two years ago that the 5.5 percent and 3 percent rates imposed by France and Luxembourg respectively, were illegal. 

A former vice president at Borders Group Inc., the onetime book giant that went out of business in 2011, is convinced there is money to be made from the book industry and has been meeting with angel and venture capital investors to help launch his startup company, ContentOro LLC. Bob Chunn, who has incubator space at Ann Arbor Spark, wants to license book content from publishers and sell it to websites in need of content. At least one local veteran entrepreneur, Chuck Newman, who founded ReCellular Inc., an Ann Arbor-based company that recycles cellphones, has bought into Chunn's vision, literally, as his first investor. 

Jaid Black, the "queen of steam," isn't feeling well, so she's dispatched Christian, a muscular, handsome 40-something, to greet me at the front door of her West Hollywood home. It's tempting to refer to Christian as a manservant, because a beefcake butler whose modeling bio boasts of a knack for finding G-spots would fit tidily into this story (and he does ask if we need anything), but in fact, he's an aspiring actor and personal trainer to A-list talent agent Kevin Huvane. He's also a friend of Black's who's willing to fetch the chocolate-caramel creamer for her coffee. 

You've heard it before: music criticism as we know it is dying, replaced witheditorial positions at Apple or lifestyle reporters masquerading as music journalists. But in one tiny corner of the publishing industry, at least one form of writing about music is surviving -- even thriving. For over a decade, Bloomsbury Publishing's 33 1/3 book series has been breathing life back into liner notes with 160-page, 4x6-in. treatises on an eclectic spectrum of 104 albums, from a nuanced account of recording Neil Young's Harvest to John Darnielle of theMountain Goats' novella about Black Sabbath's Master of Reality. 

Barnes & Noble intends to separate its college business from its Nook and retail businesses, it announced Thursday, creating two separate publicly traded companies. The move is supposed to be completed by August.

B&N CEO Michael Huseby pulled out all the possible jargon to describe the split: Separating Barnes & Noble Education will create an industry-leading, pure-play public company with more flexibility to pursue strategic opportunities in the growing educational services markets.

Amazon isn't your competition because they sell your product. They are your competition because they already own your customer.

Amazon is your competition for one reason only: attention. Amazon already has your customer in their store. Your customer is already browsing their aisles. Amazon will beat you, not because they have a better store than you, but because they have a bigger store than you. They sell enough things to already have your customer's attention. It doesn't matter if they came in to buy socks, if they're at all likely to buy your thing