Multiple reports (including this one from TechCrunch) indicate that Amazon’s tablet, which will be formally introduced at an event Wednesday morning, will be called the Kindle Fire, and will not be ready to ship until the second week of November. For the first six months of 2011, Quercus reported sales of 12 million pounds, down 20 percent from a year ago (largely due to a natural ebb in Stieg Larsson volume sales, which had boosted Quercus’s bottom line significantly for the past few years) though profits rose slightly to 3.4 million pounds during the same time frame. The cost of […]
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Tablet Rumors: Wednesday Announcement Scheduled From Amazon; Internal Slide Points to Higher-Priced BN Device
Amazon sent out invitations on Friday for an event taking place in New York on Wednesday, September 28 at 10 AM, at which time it’s widely expected the company will announce its new tablet. NYT An internal slide reportedly obtained by The Digital Reader indicates that Barnes & Noble will launch a tablet priced at $349 (code-named Acclaim) in addition to a new version of the 7″ Nook Color, code-named Encore and still priced at $249. The slide comes with initialed approval by WL/JI, which correspond to the initials of ceo William Lynch and head of digital products Jamie Iannone.
Trident Launches eBook Division
Trident Media Group has become the latest–and by far the largest–literary agency to announce an initiative to help their clients epublish, often independently of established publishing houses. The new initiative, called Trident E-Book Operations, will “create, manage and implement innovative e-book strategies for its authors, including the distribution of a variety of e-books directly” to major etailers. (Though they also see establishing “new business relationships with traditional and non-traditional publishers.”) Lyuba DiFalco and Nicole Robson will serve in the new position of co-directors of E-Book Operations, supervised by Trident’s top executives. Chairman Robert Gottlieb, who has been outspoken in the […]
A Small Kindle Lending Update
Further to yesterday’s story, we caught up with OverDrive ceo Steve Potash. While the implementation of Kindle lending to all of the over 11,000 public and school library systems served by OverDrive in the US was “still ongoing” yesterday afternoon, Potash said they were activating more systems every hour. He expected they would complete the task by late Thursday or sometime Friday, and noted that all systems had notices that either said they were live or that the service was coming soon. As to the questions about privacy, Potash conceded that the Kindle lending is an opt-in service where patrons […]
Harper to Put Thousands of Backlist Titles On Espresso Machines for Bookstores
HarperCollins has announced an agreement to make the bulk of their backlist trade paperback titles available for printing and sale by US bookstores with an Espresso book machine, currently comprising eight independent bookstores and up to another eight machines at university bookstores. Starting in November, they will make approximately 5,000 backlist trade paperbacks available. (The backlist titles not included–numbering about 3,500–are ones with physical attributes that don’t lend themselves to printing on the current machine.) The POD books will carry the same retail prices as the editions fulfilled by Harper, but in a significant change, the publisher will sell the […]
Kindle Lending: “Somebody Should Explain….”
As Kindle’s library-lending initiative went from a Seattle-area beta on Monday to a full rollout yesterday, the expected wave of confusion began. Amazon’s press release said customers “can now borrow Kindle books from more than 11,000 local libraries in the United States” but that declaration was premature. The implementation of the library offerings comes through service provider OverDrive, which did not have all of their library customers activated when the press release landed. The company said on their own blog that they are “quickly updating all US public and school library partner websites to support Kindle compatibility and will complete […]