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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

The issue of moving units vs. literary culture in publishing has taken on a more urgent and more public and seemingly more complex immediacy. A long confrontation between Hachette publishers and Amazon has ended, but not before a huge group of writers banded together to form Authors United, which sided with Hachette and took strong exception to the retailer's policies and conduct. And not before another significant, opposing, mainly online cohort excoriated publishers and writers for their (our) complaints.

If you know anyone who writes books, or if you follow any authors on social media, you're probably used to regular cries of doom and gloom about the death of writing and how Amazon is killing the book as we know it. Some of this may even be true. But if anything, it's the massive increase in writing of all kinds that is killing (or changing) the book industry, and Amazon is just one part of that phenomenon. Books - like so many other forms of media - are becoming a commodity.

More and more Indians may be getting comfortable with online buying, but that has not translated into comfort with paying for ebooks. Publisher Penguin Random House says that e-books constitute about 1% of their total book sales currently. Flipkart and Amazon did not share numbers regarding ebook sales, though Amazon, which produces and sells the Kindle ebook reader, said that the market for ebooks in India was still "nascent". Flipkart, meanwhile, cited industry reports to say that in the next three to four years, ebooks could constitute

What will book publishing bring in 2015? Shrouded as the industry is behind a veil woven of billions and billions of dollars, it's difficult to say. But if you look hard enough - at the bestseller lists, the court cases, the controversies - you can glimpse through the metaphorical keyhole and into the back rooms where the deals are made. With this in mind, here is a somewhat reliable predictor for the publishing industry in 2015.

Let's begin with what we do know: 

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.

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.

Hundreds of millions of tablets and e-readers have been sold, but today we're still inclined to think of a book as words on a page. Amazon's success with Kindle has hinged on recognizing how much more they can be. So where does the company go from here? In a series of rare, on-the-record interviews for Kindle's 7th anniversary, Amazon executives sketched out their evolving vision for the future of reading. It's wild - and it's coming into focus faster than you might have guessed.