Online Sales

Amazon's ebook subscription service, Kindle Unlimited, has attracted criticismrecently, with some self-published authors complaining that the service devalues their work and chafing at the requirement that they make their ebooks exclusive to Amazon in order to participate.

But Russ Grandinetti, Amazon's VP of Kindle Content, suggested at the Digital Book World conference in New York on Wednesday that the vast majority of authors participating are satisfied with Kindle Unlimited - and he said that the program is helping them achieve earnings that have doubled since the program's launch in July.

2015 is slated to be the year of Amazon's descent on Mexico, according to an article published this past November in Mexico's El Financiero newspaper, announcing Amazon's purchase of its first warehouse and distribution center in Cuautitlán, Izcalli in the state of Mexico. This is undoubtedly a major step in Amazon's move to spread its operations to Latin America. "Mexico is the door to Latin America, the key, the bridge," affirmed Manuel Dávila Galindo Olivares, Manager of Digital Content for the country's leading bookseller

Barnes & Noble Inc. said Thursday that Nook sales plunged 55% in the holiday season, amid plans by the largest U.S. bookstore chain to separate its struggling, but profitable, retail businesses and weak Nook operations.

Overall sales in the Nook segment, which includes the devices and accessories as well as digital content, fell to $56 million. Device and accessories sales fell 68% to $28.5 million, while digital content sales were down 25% to $27.4 million compared with a year ago.

Barnes & Noble combines a low stock-market valuation with a solid fundamental story that is still underappreciated. Shares of the country's dominant bricks-and-mortar bookseller have risen 39%, to $23, since Barron's published a bullish feature last spring ("Why Barnes & Noble Could Double," May 26). But they could hit the $30s in 2015 if the company separates Nook, its digital unit, from the rest of its business by August, as expected. Barron's sum-of-the-parts valuation for B&N (ticker: BKS) was $36 in our article; if anything, that was conservative, as it assigned no value to Nook.

Amazon Prime Now could be another leap forward in online retail. The service, which launched last week for Amazon Prime subscribers in a small portion of New York City, promises delivery of many popular goods in just an hour. It costs $8 per delivery, or if you're willing to wait two hours, then it's free. We happen to live and work in the area currently served by Amazon's trial of the service, which it plans to expand next year. So this morning we gave it a try, testing two different deliveries (in two hours, then in one hour).

Authors are upset with Amazon. Again.

For much of the last year, mainstream novelists were furious that Amazon was discouraging the sale of some titles in its confrontation with the publisher Hachette over e-books.

Now self-published writers, who owe much of their audience to the retailer's publishing platform, are unhappy.

One problem is too much competition. But a new complaint is about Kindle Unlimited, a new Amazon subscription service that offers access to 700,000 books - both self-published and traditionally published - for $9.99 a month.

Oxford has partnered with the Copyright Clearance Center to begin offering chapters on a pay-per-view basis. Pay-per-view is a well-established business model in journal publishing but is only recently gaining traction for book-based content.

Beginning in October, unauthenticated users of Oxford Handbooks began seeing buy buttons on articles. Clicking the button will allow them to purchase 24-hour access or, for a premium, unlimited perpetual access. And starting in the New Year, just in time for the start of the new term, this option will be available at the chapter level in Oxford Scholarship Online.

Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS), the largest U.S. bookstore chain, bought back Pearson Plc's stake in its Nook Media e-reader division for about $28 million, giving it complete ownership of the business.

Pearson's stake was purchased for $13.8 million and about 603,000 shares of common stock, New York-based Barnes & Noble said in a regulatory filing today.

The agreement gives Barnes & Noble more flexibility to rid itself of the struggling unit, a move investors have urged for years and that the company agreed to pursue in June.

Now that Amazon AMZN has swept away its competition in the $3 billion U.S. e-book business through years of aggressive discounting, it's starting to make peace with publishers, which should mean more profits at the world's largest bookseller.     In recent months, Amazon has signed new contracts with three of the world's five largest publishers: Legardere's Hachette, CBS Simon & Schuster and most recently, Macmillan. Those contracts return much of the pricing control of e-books back to the publishers. Not long ago, Amazon fought hard for

Late last week Macmillan reached an agreement with Amazon on a multiyear deal for print books as well as a multiyear deal on the agency model for e-books, starting on January 5, 2015. All our other retailers will also be on the agency model, leaving Apple as the only retailer who is allowed unlimited discounting. Irony prospers in the digital age.

This odd aberration in the market will cause us to occasionally change the digital list price of your books in what may seem to be random fashion.