France

eBook Subscription Services Are Legal in France (Ink, Bits & Pixels) Kindle Unlimited and its local competitors Izneo, Youscribe, and Youboox were given five months to bring their services into compliance with the legal decision. I don’t have news yet on Kindle Unlimited but I can report that Youboox, Izneo, and Youscribe are either now […]

The post Morning Link: eBook Subscription Legal in France. Metadata Good For Book Sales appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Let's start with a number: 37 million.

That's not page views or a figure about student debt. It's the number of subscribers to the PewDiePie YouTube channel.

PewDiePie is Felix Kjellberg, a video gamer with a legion of fans he calls "bros." He's the latest in a series of YouTube stars who have decided to publish a book.

"This Book Loves You" is a collection of aphorisms, bits of wisdom-slash-jokes, paired with photos and other visuals. It's coming out in October simultaneously in the U.K., Germany, Norway, Sweden and France and

Earlier this year, France made publishing news headlines when its court ruled ebook subscription services like Kindle Unlimited illegal. The law cited was the Lang Law, which gives publishers the exclusive right to set the price of a book. Retailers are not allowed to discount more than 5 percent from this set price.

You may be thinking, A measly 5 percent? Here in the United States, we're used to seeing 50 percent or more slashed off our books. Price fixing in general is regarded as suspect and is, in fact, legally so.

It's a popular stance among publishers that they and their industry are a gentle sprinkle of special snowflakes and that their software (i.e. ebooks) should be taxed at a lower VAT rate than other software (i.e. websites or any other kind of digital file).

The problem is that defining all digital media as services is exactly what a technology-neutral regulation looks like. All digital content has the same VAT. Nobody has clearly outlined how you can define ebooks as special without discriminating against other digital media

 

Here’s a modest, economical, but very cute-looking crowdfunder from France – a pitch for a mere €800 ($855) to create a Lovecraftian horror short, La Cérémonie (The Ceremony), launched by some film students at the ENS Louis Lumière academy for their graduation project. The appeal page explains: This is a film graduation project for ENS […]

The post A French Lovecraftian crowdfunder: La Cérémonie appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

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