John Sargent

Ellen Harvey is a freelance writer and editor who covers the latest technologies and strategies reshaping the publishing landscape. She previously served as the Senior Editor at Publishing Executive and Book Business.

HarperCollins has signed a deal with Amazon to sell its books, much like the contracts the online bookseller has reached with other publishers.

Relations between Amazon and the New York publishers, always rather fraught, worsened last year when the bookseller and the publisher Hachette had a multimonth conflict over the price of e-books.

Amazon discouraged sales of Hachette books to pressure the publisher, and Hachette's writers and their allies took to the barricades. The impasse was broken when Amazon signed a contract with Simon & Schuster in October and then used the same terms

Today Macmillan becomes the third Big 5 publisher to make its works available on ebook subscriptions sites Oyster and Scribd, joining HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. The move to subscription comes as no surprise. In a year-end letter to staff Macmillan CEO John Sargent wrote that, "We plan to try subscription with backlist books, and mostly with titles that are not well represented at bricks and mortar retail stores."

John Sargent is CEO of Macmillan, itself one of the Big Five publishers, although perhaps lower key and less controversial than the other four. And he penned an end-of-year message to the company’s “Authors, Illustrators, and Agents” which has appeared in full on the blog of Macmillan imprint Tor. It makes for some interesting reading. […]

The post Macmillan CEO pens interesting letter on publishing state of play appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Here are an interesting juxtaposition of posts that just came to light today. In the first, Kristine Kathryn Rusch at last returns to blogging about the publishing industry with an end-of-year post that is both interesting and scary. Last year, I wrote an open letter asking the Big Five publishers if they’d learned anything from […]

The post Kristine Kathryn Rusch, John Sargent: Major publishers learning, trying new things with e-books appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

George Packer’s epic 12,000-word piece on Amazon and the publishing industry in the current issue of The New Yorker is full of memorable reported bits—the culture clash between Amazon’s editorial staffers and its programmers, insider accounts of the company’s hiring process, the story of an Amazon employee who was handed a printout of a Slate article about Amazon’s stingy philanthropy with the words “Fix This” scrawled at the top in Bezos’s hand. But for a wide-ranging survey of the new publishing landscape, its cast of characters is a notably familiar one.

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