The ABA announced a popular set of Indies Choice Award winners for 2013, selecting “handselling favorites” as voted on by member stores. The honorees are: Fiction The Round House: A Novel, by Louise Erdrich (Harper) Nonfiction Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed (Knopf) Debut The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey (Little, Brown) Young Adult The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green (Dutton Children’s) John Green also won their “Indie Champion Award” Middle Grade Wonder, by R.J. Palacio (Knopf Books for Young Readers) Picture Book Extra Yarn, by Mac Barnett, Jon Klassen (Illus.) […]
Bookstores
Booksellers Plead with Court Not to Dismiss DRM Case
The three booksellers who sued Amazon and the six largest publishing houses for what they characterized as restrictive DRM practices filed a response to those parties’ motions to dismiss the case. In the memo, filed yesterday, Posman Books, Fiction Addiction, and Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza say Amazon are “misreading” the complaint and relying on an “unsupported assertion of what they claim is contained in non-public contracts that they have purposefully decided not to produce to the court.” The original suit–already revised and amended once–“more than adequately alleged harm to competition in the market for ebooks” in the booksellers’ view. […]
Bookselling: Northshire to Hire 25 For Saratoga Springs Store; Blackwood & Brouwer to Close; WH Smith Declines Continue
Northshire Books, which is preparing to open a second store in Saratoga Springs, NY, will announce later today that the store will hire 25 full-time and part-time employees. The Post-Star reports interviews will begin in Saratoga Springs next week, and will continue throughout the spring. Conversely, Blackwood & Brouwer in nearby Kinderhook, NY will close at the end of June after 23 years in business. “There’s no blame coming from us in any specific direction,” co-owner Rondi Brower told the Albany Times-Union. “It was a combination of factors. The miracle is that we stayed alive so long, not that we’re […]
Slim Sales, and Slim Margins, for Kobo Devices and eBooks at ABA Stores
Digital Book World has a long report on Kobo’s sales relationship with ABA stores in the US. Sales are said to be much better than what indies experienced through Google Books–but still, by most accounts are negligible, ranging from low dozens of ebooks sold since the initiative launched last November up to stores reporting sales of a few hundred ebooks. Booksellers says their margin on device sales if 5 percent, and “the margin on ebooks varies between books, depending on Kobo’s pricing and discounts, but it usually falls between 8 percent and 20 percent.” General manager of The Harvard Bookstore […]
Amazon and the Big Six Agree
The class action lawsuit brought by independent booksellers has gotten Amazon and the six largest trade publishers to agree on something: they all think the suit is without merit and should be dismissed. Since the suit appears to be a proxy action against Amazon’s market power more than anything else, their reply is likely of more interest. Amazon argues that in the ebook pricing suits Judge Cote already “determined that complaints by ‘industry stakeholders like bookstores’ about harm from Amazon’s low prices and innovations were not the basis for a legitimate antitrust claim.” Amazon turns their reply into a celebration […]
People, Awards, Etc.
Author Iain Banks reported in a statement that he has inoperable late-stage metastatic gall bladder cancer and is “extremely unlikely” to live for more than another year. “So it looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last…. Meanwhile my heroic publishers are doing all they can to bring the publication date of my new novel forward by as much as four months, to give me a better chance of being around when it hits the shelves.” At Little, Brown Children’s, Pam Gruber has been promoted to associate editor. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, Susan McIntosh has been promoted to associate director. Berlin-based […]