Seattle

Seattle leads Amazon’s 2015 list of America’s “most well-read cities.” My hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, with a population of around 150,000, is no longer #1. Amazon now compares only cities with populations of half a million or more, not the previous 100,000. Thank goodness. Alexandria’s #1 showing distracted the media and others from genuine literacy […]

The post Amazon’s ‘most well-read cities’ rankings for 2015: Thank goodness my hometown is NOT on this silly list appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Amazon's book publishing business is turning a page to a new chapter on growth.

In 2016, the company's publishing division plans to release 2,000 titles, up from 1,200 this year, and today, it ranks as the second-largest publisher on Kindle in the U.S, according to Publisher's Weekly, which interviewed Amazon's VP of Publishing Jeff Belle via email.

While the company is often recognized for being a massive seller of books, less is known about Amazon's publishing division, which appears to be thriving.

Booktrope, a Seattle-based startup with a platform and service for book authors, has raised $1.2 million of a planned $2.3 million funding round, according to a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In its SEC Form D, Booktrope (under its original identity, Libertary) indicates 14 investors are part of the round, which opened at the start of this year. The startup says it had planned to close the round after raising $1.2 million, but has extended it due to investor interest.

Speaking at Klopotek's Publishers Forum today, Lance Fensterman, Global Senior Vice President of ReedPop - the organization that produces BookCon, New York ComicCon, and many events around the world, says the publishing world needs to not think B2B or B2C, but E2E (end-to-end).

He notes that little more than five years after launch, ReedPop now runs 25 global events - making it largest producer of pop culture events around the world - and this year some one million fans will attend the events, 70% of whom are 18-35 years old.

Lumen Learning has raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by the Oregon Angel Fund, with the Portland Seed Fund, Seattle's Alliance of Angels, and local investors Ray Henderson, David Mills and Tom Rubin also participating.

Lumen Learning was founded in 2012 by Kim Thanos, an edtech strategist, and David Wiley, an adjunct faculty at Brigham Young University. Thanos says a new textbook and online homework platform for a beginning college-level Algebra course typically costs $150. Lumen Learning currently offers them for $10.

We knew it was coming.  We didn't know where, when, how, or why, but we knew Alibaba, the largest and most profitable e-commerce company in the world, and Amazon, the second largest, would inevitably come into direct contact with each other. And so it has come to pass.  Amazon, a company waging a losing battle to compete head to head with Alibaba in China, has seemingly declared "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

Today the Seattle based "Everything Store"  announced that it opened a consumer product presence on Alibaba's flagship business-to-consumer e-commerce platform, T-Mall. 

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