The Wall Street Journal

$9.99 is often treated as a magic price—the cost of a New York Times bestseller on Kindle back in the good old days, before big-six publishers adopted agency pricing models and ended Amazon’s discounting of their books. However, for a variety of reasons, few readers ever had the chance to buy those $9.99 e-books—in large part because e-readers themselves were so expensive. From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal : When Amazon.com Inc. introduced its first Kindle e-reader back in November 2007, the $9.99 digital best seller was a key selling point. Today, the price of a

COMMENTARY: Amazon (AMNZ), which usually doesn't get too specific about details of its sales, apparently felt the need to crow about the Kindle. The company claims to have sold 1 million a week for the past three weeks. It's hot news, fueled in no small part by the Kindle Fire tablet. But while Amazon congratulates itself and tries to intimidate would-be competitors, publishers are potentially pouring cold water on the retailer's ardor. E-book prices are rising, according to a Wall Street Journal report. And that could come back to hurt Amazon, as well as Barnes & Noble (BKS), as

In the mushrooming controversy over e-books, it’s easy to understand the publishers’ motives. But what about Apple? ( NSDQ: AAPL ) Did the company want to raise book prices in order to protect its iPad and blunt the rise of Amazon? These questions will...

Ads for e-books are likely to increase as the number of self-published titles continue to grow. E-reader ads received a big push earlier this year when Amazon.com unveiled a Kindle with software to show ads to readers. General Motors, Buick, Procter & Gamble’s Olay skin products and Visa were among the first advertisers.

According to Albert Greco of the Institute for Publishing Research (as reported by WSJ.com) sales of print titles will drop from $18 billion in 2008 to $13.9 billion in 2015, not including book clubs, book fairs and catalog mail orders. His projections show that e-book sales should increase to $3.6 billion by 2015 from $78 million in 2008.

 The first official sales charts including e-book sales data have been published in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, with Nielsen BookScan now supplying e-book sales reports to the US paper. Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard (Henry Holt & Co) was number one across all three non-fiction charts—hardcover, e-book and combined—with The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks taking the hardcover and combined fiction top spots, losing out to Bonnie by Iris Johansen (St Martin's Press) in the e-book only chart.

The economics of the book business are changing so rapidly the industry barely looks like it did just six months ago.

The era of the book superstores, with their big windows and welcoming tables stacked high with books, has gone into decline. Many of the country's most enthusiastic readers have already switched to less-costly digital books. Amazon customers now buy more Kindle titles than hardcovers and paperbacks.

A consumer rights class-action law firm today announced it has filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that Apple and five of the nation's top publishers illegally fix prices of e-books

While Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) grab most of the headlines these days, Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) lingers like a sleeping giant. But not for long. What Amazon has planned could challenge both tech giants in one fell swoop.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that Amazon will release a tablet PC by October. As more details emerge, we get a clearer picture of what Amazon will offer.

… There are even rumors surfacing … that Apple may be considering acquiring Barnes & Noble, Inc.

50 years ago, Lawrence Hoyt opened The Walden Book Store, which would later become Borders Group. Now, Borders is closing its doors for good.