Online Sales

When Apple goes before a federal appeals court on Dec. 15, trying to overturn the ebooks price-fixing judgment the Justice Department won against it in July 2013, there will be an elephant in the room.

That would be Amazon, the much admired and greatly feared ­discounter, which is not a party in the case. Yet the unposed question hovering over the proceedings will be: Did the regulators target the right bully?

The case stems from events that occurred five years ago, when Apple was preparing to launch its first iPad. Apple's negotiator extraordinaire, Eddy Cue

Along with Google, Kobo is one of only two major ebook retailers which don't also sell audiobooks, but that might be about to change. An observant bibliophile discovered earlier today that Kobo was then listing audiobook titles from HarperAudio in its ebookstore. The listings were incomplete and nonfunctional, but it was pretty clear that they referred to audiobooks:

A brief spin through Google turned up a couple hundred similar listings from HarperAudio. They have all since been taken down, but the ones in the Google cache looked like this:

Publishing news in the first half of 2014 was dominated by one word: subscription. Subscription-based digital trade book delivery models were announced with much fanfare from Oyster, Entitle, and many others. Such services put book publishing squarely in the digital "subscription economy" along with Netflix, Pandora, and Hulu.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos thinks e-commerce may not always be the company's biggest business.

According to Amazon SVP Andy Jassy, Bezos believes Amazon Web Services (AWS) - the company's cloud business, where it rents out its computers to other companies to run their own web sites and apps - could someday become the biggest business at Amazon.

There are reasons to be skeptical about this.

Instead of competing head on with Amazon this Black Friday, Barnes & Noble is looking to offer something that the online retailer can't. The bookstore announced today that come this weekend, it will sell 500,000 signed copies of the latest works from 100 prominent authors. On the nonfiction side, authors include George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Malcolm Gladwell, Neil Patrick Harris, and Amy Poehler. In fiction, Dan Brown, Jodi Picoult, and Donna Tartt are among those taking part. Barnes & Noble says the effort has been in the works for more than half a year

European publishers have long been dabbling in offering free ebooks to passengers on trains and buses and now HarperCollins is getting into the mix. The publisher announced this morning that it would be participating in JetBlue's Fly-Fi Hub service, which launched this morning. Pitched as a free source of content for JetBlue passengers, the Fly-Fi Hub draws from a variety of media companies and publishers, including Time inc, National Geographic, and HarperCollins. Time will be supplying  its monthly magazines while NG supplies shows, and HarperCollins will be providing excerpts of recently published books.

It's midnight in the capital of Taiwan. While some people are slowly walking home through the neon-lit streets, or getting ready to hit the club scene, others are on their way to a more unusual nocturnal hangout -- a bookstore.

The Eslite store in central Taipei opens 24 hours and has more night owl visitors than most Western bookstores could dream of during their daytime hours.

Here, young and old sit side-by-side on small steps or around reading tables, deeply engrossed in literary worlds.

So here we are. Hachette has a deal. Simon & Schuster has a deal. They have the pricing responsibility they wanted. Amazon has its "specific financial incentives" to compel them to use that power to price lower. Now we'll get to see just how badly publishers want to institute a price-based windowing system for new releases (I'm setting the over/under on new release ebook prices at $16.99. And I'm taking the over.) But what did writers get out of this? I'm glad you (rhetorically) asked, because nobody else seems to be.

Tired of dealing with the fragmented mobile marketplace that iOS and Android represent? The imagineers at Disney have come up with a terrific way to address that problem. It's both a much-needed solution for consumers and also a clever way for Disney to maintain a direct relationship with consumers who buy indirectly.

I'm referring to the Disney Movies Anywhere initiative, which lets you buy a movie on one platform and watch it on either platform.

I sometimes feel like I'm the only guy in town (NYC, but I'd include London too) contemplating out loud how Penguin Random House might use its position as by far the biggest commercial trade publisher to make life a bit more difficult for its competitors, which in the first instance means the Following Four: HarperCollins (which is much bigger than the other three), Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. What I mean, of course, is that PRH could use its position to either improve its margins in relation to everybody else