Amazon.com

Amazon.com has chosen Celeste Ng's debut novel Everything I Never Told You as its book of the year, ahead of a wealth of prominent titles from Richard Flanagan's Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (93rd) to Hilary Mantel's short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (61st) and Martin Amis's The Zone of Interest (81st). Ng's novel, due to be published in the UK this week, is about a Chinese-American family whose oldest daughter, Lydia, is found drowned in a lake.

When Amazon hired the novelist Ed Park as a senior editor in its New York publishing office in 2011, it seemed an unlikely match. Mr. Park - a member of New York's literary elite who had worked for the Poetry Foundation, co-founded a literary magazine and edited The Village Voice's literary supplement - seemed ill suited to Amazon's algorithm-driven business. The incongruity was precisely the point. By hiring Mr. Park and later giving him his own imprint, called Little A, Amazon signaled that it was willing to take risks on works with more aesthetic than commercial value.

The highly anticipated Digital Book Printing Conference is fast approaching. Next week, November 19^th, Book Business will be at the New York Marriott Marquis, discussing the challenges and opportunities that come with the rise of digital book printing. The day will be filled with education and networking opportunities for book publishers, manufacturers, and retailers, making it the only event of its kind to bring together such diverse members of the industry.

Apple is edging closer to declaring an all-out war against mega retailers like Walmart, Best Buy and CVS with its payment system. The big shopping chains do not want Apple butting into their customer relationship and have already rejected the use of Apple Pay. Yet despite the stringent opposition from the leading bricks and mortar players, Apple Pay is already more popular than all other NFC solutions combined after only one week of availability.

What makes many rival payment solutions so clunky is that you typically have to open an application to access them

oes publishing matter? Of course it does. That's one reason the dispute between Amazon.com and Hachette is so significant, because it has broader implications for the ways books are released and sold. Indeed, one of the finest aspects of the current publishing landscape is that, when it's working, things feed back into the center, and there is (or should be) room for all. This is what I don't understand about Amazon's defenders, many of who are also detractors of traditional publishing

First they dominated the book industry; now retailing giant Amazon is increasing its investment in the publishing sphere by outsourcing its selection process to readers through Kindle Scout, a self-publishing crowdsourcing venture solely for its Kindle e-reader. Would-be authors can now submit their novels to Kindle Scout for readers to peruse, who can then vote whether or not Amazon's e-book publishing company, Kindle Press, should publish them as e-books. Readers who vote for a winning book will receive a free copy to encourage future sales through reviews.

The failure of the Fire Phone has been widely cited as the reason for Amazon's disastrous quarter, but a darker cloud has settled over the world's biggest online retailer. The core of Amazon's business-its original reason for being: selling books and other media-has grown wobbly. The problem: many people no longer want to buy stuff. They'd rather rent.

Amazon is not alone. This long-predicted shift in consumer priorities-from ownership to access-also seems to be taking a bite out of Apple, another business that depends on convincing people to buy things.

You might not remember back that far, but ebook subscription services have been around for since the turn of the millennium. The Madrid-based company 24symbols was, arguably, there first-well before anyone else-and they launched in the midst of a terrifying financial recession that left nearly half of Spain's youth unemployed and the publishing industry in a free fall. Now, four years later, they are still here, and co-founder Justo Hidalgo is busy hustling his small team around the globe to work on new partnerships and launches, trying to outpace Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, Oyster, Bookmate,

Last Friday Michael Tamblyn, president and COO of ereading platform Kobo, took to Twitter with a 32-tweet manifesto on the Amazon-Hachette dispute. Tamblyn's tweets were meant to sway self-published authors from so heartily supporting Amazon, as many have throughout Hachette's negotiations. (Here's a link to the first in the series, but you can trace the whole monologue on Twitter starting on the morning of October 17th.)

Under terms of the S&S-Amazon deal, the publisher gets back the right to set the prices on its e-books - a privilege that it has not had since 2010, when the Justice Department claimed that the big US publishers were guilty of collusion in setting e-book prices. Five big consumer publishers paid multimillion-dollar sums to settle the claims. Now the new deal restores S&S's right to set its own e-book prices. The formula for selling ink-on-paper books that Amazon carries for S&S will not change appreciably.