Wednesday night TechCrunch claimed to have obtained internal documents in which “Microsoft is offering to pay $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media LLC.” — and the stock market responded Thursday morning with a jump in Barnes & Noble’s stock. It opened up more than 25 percent or about $4.60 a share but has settled over the next 90 minutes, up about $3 a share. Prior to the report, BN’s entire market cap was just over $1 billion. But the TC piece is full of errors and oddities, starting with the belief that Nook Media “also includes […]
ebookstores
Briefs: Court Hears Google Authors Guild Appeal, and More
For avid court watchers, this morning the Federal Court of Appeals was scheduled to hear oral arguments in the fight over whether to certify the author class in the long-running suit brought by the Authors Guild over Google‘s book scanning. Last year Judge Denny Chin approved certification of the class, and Google appealed that decision. We’re going to spare you further details until the court rules. Sony, which has sold its Reader devices in Australia for some time, has finally opened a Reader ebookstore there to go along with those devices. Price cuts on a variety of Nook devices — […]
Digital Briefs: iPad Sales, and txtr Expansion
Apple reported second quarter earnings after the close of the market on Tuesday, saying they sold another 19.5 million iPads (in all sizes) during the quarter. That’s only slightly lower than the 22.9 million iPads sold in the previous holiday quarter–for a total of 143.4 million iPads sold worldwide since the device launched just over 3 years ago. Berlin-based txtr says they have rolled out local ebookstores across the world English landscape, adding new storefronts recently in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland and Canada. The company has started selling their Beagle ereader directly to consumers in Europe online for […]
BooksOnBoard Suspends Sales
Longstanding independent ebookstore BooksOnBoard is at least temporarily out of the business. The site is on limited “account only access,” and a message indicates: “BooksOnBoard has temporarily stopped selling books. We are re-structuring to compete more effectively against Goliaths who have entered our marketplace since we first launched in 2006…. We expect to be back with our new business model soon. Meanwhile, customers can continue to download their prior purchases as long as the publisher and their distributors continue to make them available – same as always and out of our control. As in the past, it’s always wise to […]
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 […]
iBookstore Opens In Japan, Writers Group Objects to Random Digital Contracts, and Other Updates
Apple announced the launch of the iBookstore in Japan Tuesday, including titles from a number of the country’s largest publishers, promising “hundreds of thousands of books available for purchase.” The Kindle store opened there last October, which followed Japanese offerings from Kobo and Google Play. Japan is the 51st country in which the iBookstore operates. In Apple’s release, they also note that the iBooks app has been “downloaded 130 million times worldwide.” Separately, Smashwords noted that the iBookstore’s merchandising feature for self-published titles “Breakout Books” was featured at the top of the UK and Irish iBookstores. The blog details promotional […]