Barnes & Noble, which analysts believe needs deeper financial pockets and a global presence to compete in the digital reading space with Amazon and Apple, solved both of those issues Monday morning, creating a new subsidiary in partnership with Microsoft. The new unit, temporarily named Newco, will house B&N's digital assets, as well as its college stores, and will be backed by a $300 million investment from Microsoft that will give the tech company a 17.8% stake in Newco.
Three publishers--Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster--have agreed to a proposed settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to settle federal claims of price fixing regarding e-books. PW takes an initial look at the broad strokes of the deal, and what it means for the settling publishers.
Do you dream of seeing your book in Barnes and Noble? At Borders? Great. But have you considered the thousands of independent bookstores around the country? Independent bookstores are more likely to consider local authors or take a chance on an unknown book. Conveniently, they are organized into a group called Book Sense , an arm of the American Booksellers Association (ABA) Getting your book into these stores requires time and energy, but can help create that crucial groundswell of ardent readers creating a buzz for your book.
The Kindle is huge these days and it seems like everybody wants to learn how to sell books on the Amazon Kindle. The good news is, you can do amazingly well and make quite a bit of money selling your Ebooks on the Kindle as long as you follow these simple steps.
The American Library Association is urging Random House Inc. to reconsider its steep increases in the price of e-books for library wholesalers.
We can probably agree that the local supermarket has no moral or ethical or business obligation to sell cherry-flavored Cap'n Crunch. If the owner doesn't like cherries, she doesn't have to sell them.
People depend on libraries now more than ever. Not only do visits and circulation continue to rise, the role of public libraries in providing Internet resources to the public continues to increase as well. Public libraries have also increased their program offerings to meet greater demand and provide more targeted services.
Barnes & Noble will stop selling Amazon's books in its 703 stores, according to a statement from the company published on the New York Times Media Decoder blog.
Imagine an order for three million copies of a book or a tips booklet you wrote. Having trouble with that image? It might be that you're focusing on selling single copies, one at a time. It could be that you think there is some unattainable magic that happens somewhere in between the number one and the number million. Maybe you believe you don't know what the mechanics are for selling three million copies.
What is a library? A good place to go if you like stern, bun-headed women shushing you mercilessly? A place to store soon-to-be-obsolete books? A cultural institution past its prime in a digital age?
Books are very personal items, the books that you like will almost certainly will be different to the books that I like. In fact I would go so far as to say that I very much doubt if there is one home in the world with exactly the same selection of books upon the shelves.
These are complicated times for public libraries. Even as budgets are slashed nationwide, more people than ever are visiting their local library. Even as the unemployed seek out the quiet space and free Internet access, the group most attached to libraries remains working mothers, often accompanied by their children.
After increasing at a 169% rate in the first two months of 2011, e-book sale rose at a relatively modest 145.7% clip in March, to $69 million, according to the 16 publishers who report figures to AAP's monthly sales estimates.
Going into this year's BookExpo America, things were not looking particularly upbeat for independent booksellers. The most recent ABACUS study of bookstore sales, for 2009, showed a loss of 8.4% for 61% of the respondents; the other 39% showed only a modest gain of 3.8%.
E-book sales growth showed no signs of letting up in February, increasing at an even faster rate than they did in January. According to AAP's monthly sales estimates, e-book sales jumped 202.3% at the 16 publishers that reported results, hitting $90.3 million.
On February 28, the library e-book vendor Overdrive announced that one
publisher's e-books would expire from library collections after 26
circulations, and the publisher in question was challenging longstanding
library resource sharing and group purchasing practices. Within hours,
the publisher was identified as HarperCollins, and Twitter, Facebook,
and the biblioblogosphere exploded with posts trailing the hashtag #hcod
for HarperCollins/Overdrive.
