Larry Kirshbaum

When Amazon Publishing launched its general trade imprint in New York in 2011, the goal was to go head-to-head with the big traditional publishers here. The company announced in May of that year that it had hired industry vet Larry Kirshbaum to run the new general publishing division. Kirshbaum said at the time that Amazon was "going to back [the imprint] significantly" and that he would run it "in the vein of a major publishing house."

Amazon has wasted little time in filling a position that will be vacated by Larry Kirshbaum on January 17 when he steps down from his role as publisher of Amazon Publishing. Amazon Publishing editor-in-chief Daphne Durham has already assumed the responsibilities of publisher for Amazon's adult trade and children's publishing businesses, an Amazon spokesperson told Digital Book World. She will be based in Seattle.

After centuries in which books and the process of publishing them barely changed, the digital revolution has thrown the entire business up for grabs. It’s a transformation that began with the rise of Amazon as an online bookseller and accelerated with the resulting decline of the physical bookstore. But with the shift to ebooks—which now represent upwards of 20 percent of big publishers’ revenue, up from 1 percent in 2008—every aspect of the existing framework is now open to debate:

Amazon Publishing is launching a new imprint, called Little A, that will publish literary fiction — novels and collections of stories — and memoir.

Little A joins Amazon’s six other imprints, which focus on genres like romance and science fiction. Until now, literary fiction had been published under the general Amazon Publishing division in New York, and Little A will be part of that division. It will be overseen by senior editor Ed Park.

Amazon’s New York-based imprint has signed a deal with Ingram to distribute its ebooks to other retailers, paidContent has learned. The deal will make the ebooks available to Amazon competitors like Barnes & Noble, Apple and Kobo.
Larry Kirshbaum    

Amazon’s New York-based book publishing imprint, which is headed by publishing industry vet Larry Kirshbaum, has signed a deal with Ingram to distribute its ebooks to other retailers, paidContent has learned. Amazon and Ingram confirmed the news.

BookExpo America, the U.S. book industry’s largest trade event, hits NYC next week. Here are a few themes to look out for. Discoverability and the move to B2C Publishers are realizing that to compete with Amazon they have to be able to sell directly to consumers. One way they can do that is by making their books more discoverable. Joint venture Bookish is now almost a year late and nowhere to be seen, so startups are trying to fill the gap — for instance,  Zola Books, a New-York based company that lets publishers and authors sell e-books directly, is launching

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