Barnes & Noble Inc.
July 26, 2012
Self-publishing company FastPencil is offering some of its authors who pay for its service a better chance to get their books into Barnes & Noble retail stores and featured on Nook merchandising platforms. FastPencil hopes that the offering will help set...
July 25, 2012
"Retailers need to know what their value is, and not partner with companies that want to exploit that," says Michael Norris in this exclusive interview.
July 24, 2012
A new study from research firm SIMBA Information reveals some unsettling information: The loss of physical bookstores in 2011 did not translate to ebook growth.
The fourth edition of its Trends in Trade Book Retailing posits that the showroom effect is real, and that physical discovery is a factor, even in ebook sales.
"It may go against common sense, but the loss of hundreds of physical bookstores and several million square feet of book retailing space in 2011 actually negatively affected the expansion of e-book usage."
July 24, 2012
Just one year after moving from San Francisco to New York, Vook is enhancing its cloud-based e-book publishing platform this week. Vook, which has made its name by enabling non-techie types to publish their work electronically, is now rolling out features such as an HTML5-based reader that will let many tablets and smartphones pull up titles published through the platform.
Matthew Cavnar, Vook’s vice president of business development, who demoed the new features at this month’s NY Tech Meetup, says it’s all part of the company’s strategy to further disrupt the publishing world.
July 23, 2012
Not surprisingly, book-store owners make up a large number of the people who filed comments with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the government's antitrust case's against Apple and e-book publishers. The DOJ posted copies of the more than 800 comments on its Web site today. In April, the DOJ announced that it had filed an antitrust suit against Apple and five of the nation's largest book publishers. The government accuses Apple and of conspiring to raise prices and forcing Amazon and other retailers to follow suit. The government reached a settlement with three of the five publishers, Hachette
July 23, 2012
The Justice Department released a document today that characterized criticism by Apple and publishers of a controversial price-fixing settlement as “self-serving” and ill-founded. The Department also pointed to recent ventures by Google and Microsoft as evidence that the e-book market is thriving and that Amazon’s dominant position has been overstated. The arguments came in response to the 868 public comments that were filed in response to a settlement announced in April under which three publishers agreed they would change their pricing policy in accordance with Justice Department demands. The settlement was imposed after the Justice Department sued Apple and
July 17, 2012
We'd say it's about time. Although it's almost two years late to the party, Barnes & Noble is responding to Amazon's Kindle for the Web with Nook for Web. Much like its counterpart across the virtual aisle, the Nook web edition lets readers browse free samples and whole books entirely from a web browser while preserving the bookmarking and layout options we've come to know and love.
July 13, 2012
10 Great Summer iPad Apps (click image for larger view and for slideshow) Amazon may be developing its own smartphone--with help from some former Microsoft employees. Robert Williams, formerly a Microsoft senior program manager, used his Twitter feed this week to let the world know that he had bolted from the Redmond campus to downtown Seattle, where Amazon calls home. "Working on a top-secret project called, oops, gotta go," Williams . More Hardware Insights Webcasts More White Papers More Reports More Williams is the second high-profile member of Microsoft's mobile team to defect to Amazon in recent months.
July 13, 2012
This weekly feature examines certain ebooks’ paths to bestseller-dom, and highlights bestselling titles that are selling more copies in digital than in print. Slammed by Colleen Hoover Hoover’s first book, Slammed, is self-published and hits the NYT ebook fiction bestseller list this week at #13. The young adult romance tells the story of an 18-year-old girl, Layken, whose family has to move across the country after her father’s death. When Layken meets her new neighbor, Will, romance and challenges ensue. Hoover tells me, “I hadn’t written anything in the past ten years until December [2011], when I got the idea for
July 12, 2012
In an effort to make ebook gift-giving more spontaneous and fun, Los Angeles-based startup Livrada is partnering with Target to sell gift cards for bestselling ebook titles like 50 Shades of Grey and Gone Girl in the chain’s 1,771 stores nationwide. The pilot program, which is initially available for Kindle and Nook and will be available on other platforms by the end of the year, launches on Sunday, July 15 with six books. Five are published by Random House: Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, 44 Charles Street by Danielle Steel, Odd Thomas by
