Amazon ceo Jeff Bezos told the audience at the company’s annual meeting that their strategy for competing with Apple is the company looks to surge past Kindle in devices on the market is to stay focused on “serious reading households.” That strategy is said to drive the excuse for not adding a kolor Kindle any time soon. “Bezos said it would be easy to add a color LCD screen to the Kindle, but that it provided an inferior reading experience to the reflective E Ink Corp. technology that the device currently uses. As for color reflective screens, Mr. Bezos said […]
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Data Says Most eReader Owners Will Pay More
Do consumers mean it when they say “I’ll never more than $9.99 for an ebook”? “That’s only half bullshit,” Michael Norris, senior analyst for Simba Information, told a full room at BEA. More than a third of people said they’d never pay more than $9.99 for an ebook, though three-quarters of people said they would if they “absolutely had to,” Norris said, quoting a survey on Kindle Nation Daily. If people invest in ebook readers, said Norris, they are not going to stop using them because the price of ebooks goes to $12.99 instead of $9.99. “Kindle users are very […]
The Buzz Begins Here
Every year we struggle with how to cover, and evaluate, the books angling for attention that fairgoers haven’t read yet. This year’s experimental solution was to commission to critical assessments of some of the high-profile would-be buzz books from established reviewers. We’re pleased that so many well-known critics were happy to join us in this adventure–and a big thanks to Buzz Panel reviewers Edward Champion, Michele Filgate, Scott McLemee, Bob Minzesheimer, Jacob Silverman, and Sarah Weinman. The reviews are all highlighted on the PublishersMarketplace home page, and you can click through for the full text–or else the reviews are all […]
BEA Basics: No Exhibits until Tomorrow, But a Lot Happening Now
Old habits are hard to break. With BEA’s switch to a mid-week show and just two days of floor exhibits, a number of veteran fairgoers were confused to learn this morning that the show floor does not open until tomorrow. Sufficiently so that BEA pushed out an e-mail reminder on this point. Today is for conferences only (though the Rights Center is open, and remainders buyers are allowed on the floor.) But the conference sessions are crowded indeed. With digital publishing very much top of the agenda, the realignment of the IDBF conference to run concurrently with BEA has been […]
As BEA Opens, CEOs Miss the Way Things Were
It could be the best of times but mostly it’s the worst of times, at least as viewed for the majority of this morning’s opening conference panel at BEA featuring a variety of executives from across the business: Moderator Jonathan Galassi from FSG, Esther Newberg at ICM, Bob Miller at Workman, author and Authors Guild president Scott Turow, Skip Prichard at Ingram, and David Shanks at Penguin USA. For the better part of the one-hour and twenty-minute session, most panelists–with no offense a senior, and not exactly youthful group–were weighed down by the challenges and obstacles of the digital transition […]
Survey Says Indies Need to Discount Bestsellers, Broaden Selection to Expand Sales
Verso Digital presented ABA members with results a new online survey conducted in April targeted at consumer intelligence relevant to independent booksellers. (They surveyed 9,300 book buyers, with an estimated margin of error of 1.5 percent.) The focus was to follow up on a finding from Verso’s earlier survey that indie “mindshare” is a lot bigger than indie market share–since 23 percent of book buyers list indie stores as one of their “favorite places to shop for books,” even though indie stores are estimated to have 5 percent or less of the actual dollar market for books. (At least one […]