After teasing customers on its website yesterday that Harry Potter “Wizardry was on the Way,” Amazon announced Wednesday morning that all seven Harry Potter ebooks by J.K. Rowling will be available in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library as part of an “exclusive” license, starting June 19. Amazon tells PL the license runs “until at least 2014” and says the exclusivity means “this is the only licensing agreement of its kind for any retailer.”The French, Italian, German and Spanish editions will all be available for borrowing in KOLL. “We’re absolutely delighted to have reached this agreement with Pottermore. This is the […]
eNews
Google Launches eBooks In Italy, and More eNews
Google’s first ebookstore in a non-English-speaking country is a bit of a surprise, with the company launching Google Play with ebooks in Italy on Tuesday. The other global players are not particularly established in the Italian market already. The Kindle store launched there in December 2011, and the iBookstore opened in Italy (and much of Europe) in October 2011. Kobo named Italy as one of the markets they would launch in “shortly” back in April 2011, but have not gotten there yet. Bloomsbury Reader, created to reissue long out-of-print works as ebooks and POD paperbacks, is releasing an ebook original […]
Christian Literary Agency Alive Communications Launches ePublishing Company, Bondfire
Leading literary agency for Christian and inspirational books Alive Communications has announced a separate “sister” epublishing enterprise, Bondfire Books. In the vein of Diversion Books (Scott Waxman), Bedford Square Books (Ed Victor), Paperless Publishing (Objective Entertainment), and Rosetta Books (Arthur Klebanoff), Bondfire is a standalone epublishing company. Following the model of other epublishing start-ups, founder Rick Christian says in the announcement they are paying “a 50 percent net royalty” and “five-year renewable terms.” (Other formal enterprises involving literary agencies include Pan Macmillan’s Bello in the UK, a revival line which launched in partnership with Curtis Brown UK, and the back-in-print […]
Pocket Star Relaunches as Dedicated eBook Imprint
Pocket Books will relaunch its Pocket Star mass market paperback line as a dedicated ebook imprint, continuing to feature bestselling and debut authors in women’s fiction, romance, thrillers, urban fantasy, and mystery. Executive editor at Pocket Lauren McKenna will oversee all content for Pocket Star as editorial director. The move comes after Pocket published Kresley Cole’s novella WARLORD WANTS FOREVER as an ebook, selling 60,000 copies. The relaunched imprint will draw from its spring and summer list of titles by V.C. Andrews, Nathan Dodge, Cindy Gerard, Laura Griffin, Sabrina Jeffries, Carrie Lofty, and Michael R. Underwood, among others, and Pocket […]
eNews: Low Estimates for Q1 Amazon and BN Tablets; Diesel eBooks for Miles; Glenn Beck’s eSerial and The Missing Metadata
IDC is one of the monitoring companies that publishes quarterly estimates of shipments of tablets and ereaders from Asian manufacturers. Usually their updates don’t cause a big stir, but this time around their estimates for the first quarter of 2012 fit the narrative of the moment: supply of Amazon’s Kindle Fire dwindled sharply. After shipping an estimated 4.8 million units in the holiday quarter, IDC puts the first quarter Fire number at 700,000 units. To be fair, it was a light quarter for Barnes & Noble‘s tablets as well, reflecting a dropoff in the reader’s tablet market (and a corresponding […]
Trade Sales Up 22% In February, While eBook Sales Flatten Out (Sort Of)
The AAP reported sales for February, the second installment in their expanded Stat Shot tabulations. Though it doesn’t fit the narrative in the general and tech press, trade sales of $438 million were up 22 percent over last year’s revised count of $360 million, driven by a $58.5 million gain in children’s and YA (not doubt due in part to the major success of the Hunger Games books, which added 12.5 million units in print in the first three months of the year). Those sales were cleaner as well, with the absence of the big Borders returns a year ago […]