Online Sales

With questions arising about Agency Model pricing, Book Business examined the 10 best-selling e-books lists during mid August to get a sense of what prices seemed to be "right" for trade consumers.

Lagardère SCA released its 2011 first-half results today, announcing stable net sales of 3.724 million euros, up .2% on a reported basis.

Barnes & Noble, Inc., the world's largest bookseller, today reported sales and earnings for its fiscal 2012 first quarter ended July 30, 2011.

Bertelsmann AG announced Random House's half-year earnings in a press release today, accompanied by a letter from Bertelsmann chairman and CEO.

The economics of the book business are changing so rapidly the industry barely looks like it did just six months ago.

The era of the book superstores, with their big windows and welcoming tables stacked high with books, has gone into decline. Many of the country's most enthusiastic readers have already switched to less-costly digital books. Amazon customers now buy more Kindle titles than hardcovers and paperbacks.

Gollancz, an imprint of London-based Orion Publishing Group, has announced a plan to digitize 5000 out-of-print novels in what it claims will be the world's largest digital library of science fiction and fantasy books.

Some may call this an era of evolution in book publishing, but it also could be called the Era of Major Lawsuits taking on golliaths like Apple.

Amazon has found a way around Apple's policies for purchasing content in its App Store—the Kindle Cloud Reader, a Web application that runs in a browser.

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.

Are the days of hanging a child's stories on the refrigerator soon to be gone? Not likely, but now kids and parents have a new option for putting these stories on display.