Amazon.com

Simon & Schuster has negotiated a multiyear deal with Amazon for both print and electronic books, the publisher told its writers Monday.

The agreement "is economically advantageous for both Simon & Schuster and its authors and maintains the author's share of income generated from eBook sales," said a letter signed by Carolyn Reidy, the publisher's chief executive. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

"With some limited exceptions," the new contract gives control of e-book pricing to Simon & Schuster, the letter said.

The writer Ursula K. Le Guin recently weighed in on Amazon's dispute with the publisher Hachette over e-book pricing. Referring to how Amazon is making Hachette books harder to buy on its site, she said, "We're talking about censorship: deliberately making a book hard or impossible to get, 'disappearing' an author."

Her statement was greeted with ridicule and outrage in the places on the Internet where those who use Amazon's self-publishing platform hang out. Here are a few of the more printable comments from the Passive Voice blog:

Booksellers have met with European Commission officials to discuss their concerns that Amazon holds a monopoly in the online book market. The booksellers urged the Commission to make sure that consumers will have a rich and diversified online book offering, said Françoise Dubruille, director of the European and International Booksellers Federation (EIBF), the umbrella organization for the EU's national booksellers associations. The group met this week with Despina Spanou, director for consumer policy at the European Commission, she said.

​Apple and Samsung have led the market substantially since the inception of media tablets. However, the race for third is up for grabs and competition is heating up between Lenovo, Amazon, ASUS, and other emerging vendors. The aggressive nature of the market and substantial increase in emerging vendors has created a stall for leaders in the market giving PC OEMs the opportunity to close the gap between leaders and followers. According to market intelligence firm ABI Research, emerging vendors are forecasted to experience a CAGR of 22.8% between 2014 and 2019.

The authors are uniting. Last spring, when Amazon began discouraging customers from buying books published by Hachette, the writers grumbled that they were pawns in the retailer's contract negotiations over e-book prices. During the summer, they banded together and publicly protested Amazon's actions. Now, hundreds of other writers, including some of the world's most distinguished, are joining the coalition. Few if any are published by Hachette. And they have goals far broader than freeing up the Hachette titles. They want the Justice Department to investigate Amazon for illegal monopoly tactics.

At one time, Stephen King was on the cutting edge of ebook technology as one of the first big-name writers to release his works digitally. But for all the "bells and whistles" ebooks have, King says, nothing will be able to replace a physical book. King joined HuffPost Live on Wednesday to chat about his upcoming film, "A Good Marriage," though the conversation turned to future of the book industry.

The chance to publish the second edition of our Guide to Digital Publishing Platformswas a great opportunity to rethink many of the basic concepts of book publishing such as the role of the cover, and the need for using as many digital bookstores as possible. It is common wisdom that when publishing a book, the cover design is one of the most important elements that will influence a book's sales success. Much money is spent employing book design experts to make sure a book cover is attractive and lures the reader in.

This month we're asking the Chefs about customer focus. The question was inspired by a comment that Rick Anderson posted in August in which he wondered if the enhancements and features publishers implement are truly focused on customer needs. Seeing all of the Chefs' responses, and having opinions of my own, I find it very interesting that almost everyone, in one manner or another, took a step back and pondered: Who are the customers? 

When John Ashbery, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, first learned that the digital editions of his poetry looked nothing like the print version, he was stunned. There were no line breaks, and the stanzas had been jammed together into a block of text that looked like prose. The careful architecture of his poems had been leveled.

He complained to his publisher, Ecco, and those four e-books were immediately withdrawn.

Amazon, if you're reading this, we need to talk.

There's been a flurry of blogging, largely from the USA, around the recent announcement of your new service, Kindle Unlimited (not yet available in the UK).  For $10 a year, Kindle users have unlimited access to 600 000 e-books and a couple of thousand e-audiobooks.

People have been asking "Why do we need libraries anymore?"

Some of the blogs have been looking at the possible impact on public libraries, with a couple taking the predictable line of "Hey! Why do we need expensive buildings