Working from posted online bestseller lists at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com (and using historical data already captured through the PM Book Tracker), you can see that at least some Macmillan book sales would appear to already be shifting to BN.com from Amazon: * Andrew Young’s The Politician is down to 10 on Amazon’s list and falling, while ranking No. 4 at BN.com * Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right is now at 49 on Amazon, down from 34 last night–and has risen from 112 up to 49 at BN.com in the same time period. * […]
Archives for January 2010
Amazon Removes Macmillan Buy Buttons
Many have wondered how Amazon would react to the biggest publishers’ efforts to challenge the etailer’s loss-leader price point for new releases in ebook form and move broadly to an agency model for selling ebooks, with Apple’s iBookstore but also broadly across accounts. And, as reported earlier, the speculation intensified after the WSJ played a video of Steve Jobs assuring Walt Mossberg that Amazon would need to sell ebooks at the same price as Apple because “publishers will actually withhold their [e]books from Amazon…because they are not happy with the price.” Sometime late Friday Amazon took the lead on withholding, […]
More On Barnes & Noble Stock, Sony Says Reader Sales Quadrupled
Meanwhile, on the continuing story of Aletheia Research and the Yucaipa Cos. toying with bookselling stocks, in the first three weeks of January (and especially on January 20), as Ron Marshall was closing his deal to run A&P and discussing his experiences at Borders, Aletheia bought another 268,000 or so share of Barnes & Noble. That boosts their stake to 15.71 percent of shares.SEC filing Deputy president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division Fujio Noguchi said at a press conference their Reader sales “quadrupled on a year-over-year basis” in 2009. It was the bestseller at their Sony Style online store […]
More Google Objections
New filings logged on the Court’s web site in the Google Books Settlement case include objections from the state of Connecticut, Microsoft, and AT&T. The Connecticut attorney general asserts that, even with modifications designed to appease the many states that objected to the previous settlement agreement, it “continues to unlawfully misappropriate unclaimed funds for the maintenance of the Book Rights Registry.” Microsoft, repeating many earlier arguments, also adds that the curtailing of some of the settlements’ new revenue models “does not help. Not only do these permitted future uses remain sweepingly broad, they would constitute new types of infringement that […]
Steve Jobs Makes It Quite Clear How This Will Work
Further to our own reports on how publishers hope/expect to the deploy the agency model of selling terms broadly across their ebook accounts to retake some measure of control over the pricing of new releases, Apple’s Steve Jobs essentially confirmed the plan to the WSJ’s Walt Mossberg in a brief video interview. Mossberg wondered why someone “should buy a [b]book for $14.99 when you can buy one from Amazon for $9.99 on the Kindle or Barnes & Noble?” A confident Jobs replies, “That won’t be the case…. The prices will be the same.” How in the world will prices be […]
People: Rucci to Putnam, and More
Marysue Rucci will move to Putnam on March 15 as editorial director where she will “build her own roster of authors and help the Putnam imprint acquire and develop new bestselling franchises both in fiction and nonfiction.” Rucci will report to president Ivan Held (and editor-in-chief Neil Nyren, Amy Einhorn and Marian Wood will also continue to report to Held). Rucci has been executive editor at Simon & Schuster, where she has worked for 13 years. Brendan Deneen has joined Thomas Dunne Books as an editor. He was an agent at FinePrint Literary. Nicole Reardon has been promoted to associate […]