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Amazon Wins Tentative CA Sales Tax Reprieve, and Free Romney eBook; French Publishers Drop Suit Against Google

September 8, 2011
By Sarah Weinman

On Wednesday night Amazon and California state legislative leaders reached a tentative deal with respect to the state’s new online sales tax law. Under their agreement Amazon would not have to collect sales tax until September 2012, and in return the retailer would drop its referendum campaign to overturn the law, on which they have spent $5 million so far.

“It’s a safe harbor for up to a year,” State Assemblyman Charles Calderon told the LAT of the agreement he helped strike. “If they can’t get Congress to act by next July, then they will start to collect the tax in September 2012. If by chance they get Congress to act, then that would trump the state law.” There is no indication, however, whether Governor Jerry Brown will support the deal. (And existing California law still requires residents to pay the state sales tax for online purchases when it is not collected by the etailers.)
LAT

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney billed his jobs plan yesterday, which is presented in a 161-page downloadable PDF and ebook, BELIEVE IN AMERICA: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth. If Romney wants to boost jobs across the country, some may wonder why he’s specifically driving traffic to Amazon’s Kindle instead of making the free file available on all the ebook platforms. (At least one Amazon commenter from Colorado lamented, “I find it ironic that a book about creating jobs on a web site that put so many mom and pop book, record and other types of stores out of business….”)

This morning the title was No. 13 on Amazon’s free Kindle list. The campaign says 15,000 people downloaded the title (also available via a goofy requirement to “pay” with a Tweet or Facebook post to qualify for a free PDF).

Moving from Amazon to Google, in France, Albin Michel, Gallimard and Flammarion dropped their 9.8 million euro lawsuit against Google so as to resume negotiations on the scope of Google’s digital books scanning. “This is a great news,” Google Books French director Philippe Colombet told Bloomberg. “We are keen to discuss constructively and work with publishers around the world to preserve and disseminate our important cultural treasures, and to find new business opportunities for authors and publishers.” Earlier Google reached agreements with Hachette Livre and La Martiniere Groupe to allow scanning of out-of-copyright works.
Bloomberg

Filed Under: eNews, Finance, Free, Legal

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