Yesterday the NYT announced that they would publish their first digital-only book, OPEN SECRETS: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy. In the paper’s own press release, they say the ebook publishes January 31 “through major e-booksellers.” The NYT’s own “product page” says you can buy the book now from Nook and links to their estore, adding that it’s “coming soon to Kindle, iBookstore and Google eBooks. And in Barnes & Noble’s press release yesterday, they said they were “the only company taking pre-orders” for the book, for “download later this week.” Nook owners are also promised “exclusive additional content from The […]
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Amazon Launches First “Singles” List, With Pete Hamill’s Previously Cancelled Immigration Work
Amazon posted their first list of just over 20 Kindle Singles, short nonfiction digital works “typically between 5,000 and 30,000 words.” With no page counts, consistent with Kindle ethos, consumers will have only price (currently ranging from 99 cents to $2.99) and kilobyte counts to estimate how long these works are prior to purchase. Among the titles is a version of Pete Hamill’s piece on immmigration, THEY ARE US, originally intended as a 40,000 to 50,000-word digital original from Little, Brown last fall. Hamill had not delivered as intended, and reportedly backed off the project due to his wife’s illness. […]
More Highlights From DBW’s First Day
We have lots more DBW coverage from Day 1 over at the PM website. Some of the highlights include: — An outside dose of reality on the future of brick-and-mortar bookselling from Goldman Sachs analyst Matt Fassler and Susquehanna Financial Group’s Marianne Wolk. Fassler was down on B&N’s prospects: “There are no safe investments, but publishers and booksellers are something to avoid” in his assessment, because they don’t control their own destiny. Wolk believes that Amazon makes little to no profit from ebooks as they try to maintain dominant market share, and doesn’t even think it’s a corporate goal to […]
Publishers Battle on Territorial Rights and Try Out New Skill Sets
The panel on territorial rights issues, Will Territorial Sales Become Obsolete?, moderated by Janklow & Nesbit rights director Cullen Stanley, showed some small shifts in thinking about English-language international sales. The always entertaining Andrew Franklin, president of Profile Books, got a laugh by pointing out that the structure of today’s contracts goes back to 1947: “The British had lost their empire, they kept everything that had been their empire and gave the US the rest. It has to go. The open market is absolutely a legacy of the physical book and it has to go.” Asked if he would prefer […]
Data Day at DBW
The second day of Digital Book World began with a block of three data presentations on consumer habits with respect to ebook purchases and ereading devices. (To be clear, we have cheated: since 92 percent of conference attendees and reporters find big presentations of data hard to take in, and take down, on the fly, the three presenters let us look over their slides in advance, which is the basis of this report.) Verso Digital conducted a new survey of book acquisition habits, this time looking at both purchasing and borrowing together–in print, digital and a mixture of the two–in […]
Analysts See Low Profits from eBooks for Amazon and BN
A Digital Book World panel on Tuesday presenting how Wall Street views bookselling and the future of bricks and mortar brought an outside dose of reality via Goldman Sachs analyst Matt Fassler and Susquehanna Financial Group’s Marianne Wold. Fassler covers Barnes & Noble’s stock (and used to cover Borders when they were big enough to be worth following), but is down on their prospects: “There are no safe investments, but publishers and booksellers are something to avoid” in his assessment, because they don’t control their own destiny. He believes that, while the retailer’s investment in Nook was necessary and prudent, […]