With Barnes & Noble reporting earnings on a delayed schedule this Thursday, possible news is leaking ahead of time. As the company has been looking for a way to split the BN superstores–a profitable but declining business that looks like it should be privately-held–from the Nook Media business, the logical potential buyer, Len Riggio, is emerging as a candidate yet again. The WSJ cites a source who says “a public disclosure of his interest” is expected this week, while also noting “his expression of interest so far has been tentative”. The Journal goes rather far in conjecturing that stores “could […]
ebookstores
Apple Self-Publishing Promotion Gets Outsized Promotion; Amazon Gets Legal Protection for System that Might Not be Legal
It’s easy to lose perspective when everyone is covering book publishing but there is no common context or compass. This week’s big example is Apple’s iBookstore extension of a merchandising pilot from their stores in Australia, Canada and the UK to the US: a promotional carousel of about 70 self-published books, dubbed Breakout Books. It’s getting home page rotation in the iBookstore for “at least two weeks” and then will be a less prominent standing category. Highlighted on the Smashwords blog, this modest promotion has become national news, as part of coverage of The Revolution. (Most self-published titles in the […]
eNews: NYPost’s First eBook (With Harper’s Help); Apple Sells 22.9 Million iPads; Kindle Paperwhite Available in Canada; and More
The New York Post has entered the ebook market, publishing with their corporate sibling HarperCollins, starting with Tricks of the Trade by Ashley Dupre, the paper’s sex advice columnist and former escort who became famous from the Eliot Spitzer scandal. NY Post publisher Jesse Angelo said in a release the ebook, available on various platforms for $5.99, “is a unique and fun book — the perfect way for the Post to enter the market…We expect it will be the first of many Post e-books to come in partnership with HarperCollins.” Digital Book World is offering its first ebook, Finding the […]
Kobo’s ABA/Indie Customer Is Very Different
In a DBW presentation, Kobo executive Michael Tamblyn reintroduced Kobo as “the largest ebook company that you may not have heard much about”–since, up until recently, “we have for the most part left the US alone.” Tamblyn noted, “we left our US competitors to club each other bloody while we went to other places” to serve unmet demand and expand markets. With the first results in from their new US efforts in concert with ABA stores, Tamblyn reported some of their early observations–which make a clear case that the “indie store” ebook customer is very different than Kobo’s standard US […]
eNews: Penguin Joins Espresso; Kobo Eyes Russia, India, China and Beyond
Penguin Group is making their titles available through the Espresso Book Machine. EVP of business operations Doug Whiteman says in the announcement, “Penguin is always looking for new ways to bring our writers to readers and On Demand Books gives us another channel to further fulfill that mission. We are grateful to have this opportunity to extend the way we serve our booksellers, authors and readers.” Penguin’s self-publishing and workshop community Book Country announced new changes and features, including a free ebook creation tool and a online editor. Book Country has also raised the royalty rates offered to authors who […]
More On the Story We Can’t Report
Despite a peppy press release from Random House UK declaring “a digital Christmas for all the family” and a story echoing that theme in the Bookseller, we’re still struck by the holiday story that no one is reporting: The significant post-holiday ebook sales burst that has lifted the step-level of the market over the past few yearsappears to have been substantially smaller in both the US and now the UK. And no device maker has provided exuberant news about sales so far. By Random House UK’s own account, “sales of ebooks in the Christmas week” were up only 13 percent […]