Barnes & Noble noted in a release that the New York State Attorney General subpoenaed the company as part of an investigation into online retailers who link customers to discount clubs that charge hidden fees. BN “said that it wants to reassure customers that it is not one of the retailers who turns over personal or credit or debit card information to discount clubs.” BN.com president William Lynch said the investigation “will show that Barnes & Noble does not, nor has it ever, shared customer debit or credit card information with discount clubs. Customers should be reassured that their personal […]
Archives for January 2010
Random House On their Ongoing "Conversations" with Apple
Random House welcomes Apple’s iPad and iBooks app and we look forward to our continuing conversations with them about how we might best work together.
Apple Partners with All Big Six But Random House; iPad Starts at $499
At today’s iPad announcement Apple introduced a new ebook app, using epub, called iBooks. The logos of all of the big six were displayed on stage as participating partners, leaving aside Random House. (We could not reach Random House yet for comment.) Sample price baskets shown top out at 14.99 though they did not speak to price or business details at the event. The new iBooks bookstores was called similar to iTunes, and integrates with the iBooks reading app. Steve Jobs gave props to Amazon: “Amazon has done a great job of pioneering this… we’re going to stand on their […]
More Consumer eReading Insights from New BISG Study
Kelly Gallagher started today’s Digital Book World presentations with the first highlights of data from the BISG’s new survey of consumer attitudes towards ereading. Aiming to evaluate “how traditional print-book buyers are interacting with ebooks”–and to be repeated two more times this year to track changes in readers’ habits–they surveyed about 550 people from their panel of survey panel of 36,000 book readers (after “qualifying” a mere 2.4 percent of that group overall as able to speak about ereading habits at all). As with other data presentations, our caution–data-heavy slides went flying by so are hard to present fully here. […]
DBW: Looking for the E-Book's Tipping Point
The morning keynote panel discussion at Digital Book World’s second day tried to answer a whole lot of very important questions on the digital front, like what percentage of e-book sales will be the disruption point, the relationship between digital growth and print decline (if there even is such a relationship) the messy ramifications of territory, whether an agency model will stick, and, more practically, what is each panelist’s preferred mode of reading. Moderator and DBW founder Mike Shatzkin was not shy in peppering his panel of “four smart eloquent guys” with his queries, and on hand to field them […]
WH Smith Holiday Comps Down 5 Percent
In a brief trading update, UK retailer WH Smith congratulated itself for having same-store sales at their high street stores decline 5 percent for the eleven-week holiday selling period ending January 23–slightly weaker than the 4 percent comp decline for the past 21 weeks.Company release