Hachette Book Group

“When you lose control over your price point you are on the way to death,” said Hachette Livre Chairman and CEO Arnaud Nourry when asked if he was worried about perceptions of the value of books created by Amazon’s drive to discount. “We have to be very careful and never think it is behind us,”…

Apple is "its own worst enemy," says a court-appointed monitor whom the company continues to impede. After it was confirmed that Apple conspired with at least five major book publishers to up ebook prices and keep competitors such as Amazon at bay from the industry, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote assigned former U.S. Justice Department…

When the topic of direct-to-consumer sales arises in the book industry, a few key concepts come to mind: ecommerce sites, shopping carts, data analytics, and metadata, to name a few. While certainly important, these technical components of a direct sales strategy are rather worthless if publishers overlook a more abstract concept—that is, a “relationship” with…

The Perseus Books Group, a large independent publisher, is up for sale again. The company announced on Wednesday that it had hired the investment banking firm Greenhill & Company to advise it on a possible sale, after receiving multiple inquiries from potential buyers.

When the world's largest publishers struck ebook distribution deals with Amazon.com Inc. over the past several months, they seemingly got what they wanted: the right to set the prices of their titles and avoid the steep discounts the online retail giant often applies. But in the early going, that strategy doesn't appear to be paying…

I’ve admitted before on this blog that I’m not a big ebook reader. Despite being branded as a tech-savvy, social-media-rampant millennial, I still prefer print reads. But I’m not a “I love the smell of old books,” person or the “I enjoy holding something tangible in my hands” type. When it comes down to it,…

Simon & Schuster’s Glommable marks a growing trend in consumer-facing websites that utilize original content to collect audience data.

Five years after Amazon secretly asked regulators to investigate leading publishers - a case that ended up reinforcing the e-commerce company's clout - groups representing thousands of authors, agents and independent booksellers are asking the United States Department of Justice to examine Amazon for antitrust violations. Perhaps stealing a page from Amazon, which often promotes policies that would benefit it by talking about what customers want, the groups said their concerns were more about freedom of expression and a healthy culture than about themselves.

Hachette Australia has announced an open casting call for a woman who is willing to "donate" her back for a large, permanent tattoo that will be used to promote the fourth book in Stieg Larsson's wildly successful Millennium Series (it's being called, explicitly, "tatvertising"). The series is best known for its first volume, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which was adapted for film by Danish director Niels Arden Oplev in 2009 and again by thriller magnate David Fincher in 2011 - hence the obvious need to promote with an actual dragon tattoo on a real person.

Just ten days ago, industry and regulators in Europe feared that the Commission's probe into Amazon had gone dormant.

But while the timing of the probe announced Thursday by Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, may have been a surprise, the Commission's interest in the topic is certainly not. A series of high-profile bust-ups in recent years over e-book pricing have drawn the attention of regulators. And at the heart of this dispute is a simple question that has big ramifications for the future of digital publishing.

Who should set the price of e-books: the publishers or Amazon?