Google eBooks recently notified some of their affiliates that their relationship was being terminated. Shortly thereafter, Google told some of those affiliates–mainly independent booksellers, including some ABA members who do not use the Indie Commerce service–that they were removed erroneously from the program and would be reinstated. A Google spokesperson told us Tuesday, “We did not intend to deactivate independent booksellers from the Google eBooks affiliate program and are working to reinstate those who were mistakenly notified. We apologize for any inconvenience.” People can ask to participate by e-mailing ebooks-affiliates@google.com. Google had opened the program to “retailers, bloggers, book publishers and other […]
ebookstores
Amazon Removes Kindle Versions of IPG Books After Distributor Declines to Change Selling Terms
President of the second-largest independent book distributor Independent Publishers Group (IPG) Mark Suchomel said in an e-mail alert yesterday, “I am disappointed to report that Amazon.com has failed to renew its agreement with IPG to sell Kindle titles.” As of yesterday, Suchomel says, Amazon has taken down all IPG ebooks from its site, though they continue to sell print books from the distributor’s clients. (Our own check confirms that Kindle editions are missing for IPG titles, complete with the standard box to “tell the publisher!” you would like to read this book on Kindle. Individual Kindle hyperlinks now result in […]
Amazon Updates
In the daily Amazon news, the company is said to be negotiating for part of a 12.5 acre parcel of land next to their South Lake Union headquarters in Seattle in order to expand. Research firm OTR Global has echoed a report from Digitimes in January, saying that information from Asias component suppliers indicates that first quarter “component orders for Amazon’s Kindle Fire and ereaders are down significantly…due to abundant inventory of finished product in the supply chain.” Separately, market research firm IHS iSuppli estimates Amazon shipped 3.9 million Fires in the fourth quarter–lower than many analyst guesses–and said that […]
eNews: IDPF’s Readium Aims to Drive ePub 3 Implementation; Foyles Launches eSales with txtr
The IDPF announced the Readium Project, an open source initiative “to develop a comprehensive reference implementation of the ePUB 3 standard,” built on the WebKit rendering engine. The project is designed to “significantly accelerate EPUB 3 adoption and increase implementation consistency,” IDPF executive director Bill McCoy says. It has wide support from many organizations and etailers–though not Apple, or Amazon (which is not an IDPF member). Library City has a follow-up q&a with McCoy. Among his remarks, “given that PDF support is increasingly built-in to browsers (e.g. Chrome ships with PDF support) it’s logical to imagine built-in EPUB support in […]
eNews: ProPublica Expands eBook Line; Goodreads Drops Amazon API
Online investigative journalism site ProPublica is the latest publication to produce an expanded line of ebooks, now in a “digital publishing partnership” with Open Road. (The journalism organization issued four titles as Kindle Singles last spring.) The new line of ebooks, priced at $5 or less and available as of the end of February, will be based on previously published material in expanded form, including “Presidential Pardons” (a series that ran in the Washington Post) and “Post-Mortems,” an investigation of coroner and medical examiner offices ProPublica did in conjunction with NPR and Frontline. Each ebook will also include additional material […]
More DBW: Learning How to Sell eBooks All Over the World
Kobo executive Michael Tamblyn provided a look at some of the challenges of taking ebooks global quickly. Among the biggest challenges has been Japan, home of their new parent company Rakuten. “We’ve learned a lot working in Japan,” he said. “They have everything there–it’s just evolved completely differently” than in the rest of the book publishing world. They have no metadata standards, two competing ebook standards, very little simultaneous release in print and digital, file conversion challenges, and very few centralized repositories. In many countries, as Tamblyn underscored, “we see a lot of vertical integration once we get outside of […]