Bookselling Laurel Book Store in downtown Oakland, CA will close in August when their lease expires, as “ongoing sales have not been enough to meet expenses comfortably.” Owner Luan Stauss writes she is “continuing to engage with” potential business partners or buyers. Initiatives Simon & Schuster is launching consumer promotion program, Book Club Favorites, designed to highlight “noteworthy book club titles…from across the company.” Monthly picks will include bestselling authors as well as new voices. Debuting in July, the first title is the paperback edition Alice Hoffman’s The Rules of Magic. Discussion questions and other content will be available on the Book […]
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Amazon Launches Book Subscription Box for Children
Amazon has entered the burgeoning business of book subscription boxes with their Prime Book Box program. The new initiative provides a collection of “books tailored to your child’s age” — two hardcovers, or four board books for kids 2 and under — sent every 1, 2 or 3 months, priced at $22.99 per box, plus tax. For now the program is offered to Amazon Prime members in the US only. They say that books in the boxes will be selected by a combination of “expert recommendations from our Amazon Books editors and customer ratings and reviews. Subscribers are presented with a […]
Fall Announcements: Illustrated Hosseini Book for September, Albom for October, Sanders for November, and More
It’s the day to announce forthcoming fall books. Khaled Hosseini’s SEA PRAYER, a short, illustrated book written “in response to the current refugee crisis and the haunting image of young Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up on the beach in Turkey,” will be published September 18 by Riverhead (and August 30 by Bloomsbury UK). London-based artist Dan Williams will illustrate. Deneen Howell at Williams & Connolly represented Hosseini in the deals. Sea Prayer was first released as a Guardian virtual film on September 1, 2017 in collaboration with the UN Refugee Agency (and the text is posted here). […]
Scribd Returns to (Mostly) Unlimited Subscriptions, Now That They Are “More Profitable Than We Wanted”
Subscription service Scribd has resumed providing unlimited access to their catalog of books, audiobooks and other materials to most participants, while curtailing the benefits for the “small fraction of readers who read a high-volume of books,” according to ceo Trip Adler. After launching with unlimited reading of ebooks in 2014, and adding unlimited access to audiobooks later that year, the company had cut back to one audiobook per month in mid-2015 and curtailed unlimited reading in early 2016, to help “achieve long-term sustainability.” Adler says, “We decided to go back to unlimited because it works better in terms of providing a […]
Walmart Pairs with Kobo for US eBooks
As part of a broader “strategic alliance” in both the US and Japan between Walmart and Rakuten, Kobo will provide ebooks, digital audiobooks and ebooks devices to Walmart in the US. The two announced “an exclusive retail alliance that will enable Walmart to begin selling eBooks and audiobooks, as well as offer Rakuten Kobo eReaders, in Walmart stores and online at Walmart.com in the United States starting later this year.” Walmart will be Kobo’s “exclusive mass retail partner for the Kobo brand in the US. Walmart.com will sell Kobo edooks and audiobooks through a Walmart/Kobo co-branded app. Walmart indicates that […]
Apple Books Changes
Bloomberg looks at some changes on the way from Apple. In an early developer version of iOS 11.3, Apple is changing iBooks to Books; as they have done with music and podcasts, the service will be known as Apple Books going forward. The iBookstore (soon just Apple Bookstore) will be redesigned to “look more like the new App Store launched last year, according to people familiar with its development. The revamped app in testing includes a new section called Reading Now and a dedicated tab for audio books, the people said.” What happens in that audio books tab is the […]