Since the early days of online interfaces and quality print-on-demand manufacturing, a number of companies have taken ultimately unsuccessful passes at building a business around user-customized cookbooks. In the wake of Tastebook and many others comes Tasty: The Cookbook — though this latest effort is driven by BuzzFeed, which is aiming the initiative at their substantial audience of 75 million Facebook followers for their Tasty food vertical. As Fast Company notes, “The company claims 50 percent of all Americans see a Tasty video every month—which back of napkin math equates to almost every Facebook user in the country seeing the content over […]
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EU Takes One More Step Towards Maybe Allowing Reduced Tax on eBooks Some Day
The European Union’s achingly slow battle over whether to allow ebooks the same potential for preferential sales tax treatment that print books are given has taken another expected steps towards potential resolution…some time in 2017. Or not. Following on a plan announced this spring, the European Commission has presented a formal proposal for a variety of tax rule revisions. Included in those extensive proposals is one on ebooks that “allow – but not oblige – Member States” to give ebooks (and digital newspapers, magazines, etc.) the same lower or nonexistent VAT status that they give currently to print books. But […]
International Briefs: Kobo, Amazon, Luebbe and More
The rest of the world was open for business all week long and accounts for much of the catch-up news: – Kobo has now redirected their efforts to sell ebooks and ereading devices in Spain towards their France-based retail partner Fnac. The relationship has been expanded to Spain, where Fnac has 50 stores. Kobo first opened their own local ebookstore in 2011 and sells titles in Spanish, Catalan, Basque, and Galician. In 2013 they had partnered with La Central’s group of seven stores. – Germany’s Luebbe has sold 80 percent of their gift product line Rader for 14.1 million euros, valuing the company at about one […]
Pottermore Reports Another Big Loss, Still Promising Turnaround
A year ago JK Rowling’s representatives were insisting the worst was behind them after reporting a significant annual loss for Pottermore, citing “recording breaking sales in December 2015” — and now the turnaround story is being pitched again. They are “on the path to profitability” for the fiscal year ending March 2017, but as for the just-reported year ending March 2016 (Companies House filings in the UK have a long time lag), they lost money again. Sales did indeed rise significantly, to £15.1 million pounds, but the site still incurred a pre-tax loss of £4.9 million. In the prior year, […]
Kindle Unlimited Pool and Page Rate Rise, As Pages Read Declines
In their latest retroactive allocation of funds, Amazon has decided to give Kindle Unlimited participants a slightly larger pool of funds to share for October — $16.2 million (up from $15.9 million in September), with the per page payment rate jumping to $.005189 (up from $0.00497397). But at least some authors continue to have concerns about whether the software that tracks page reads is functioning correctly, as previously reported in October. Total pages read declined for the second month, to approximately 3.122 billion, down 2.3 percent from the 3.197 billion pages counted in September.indle
Barnes & Noble Officially Launches $50 Tablet
The inexpensive, small Nook tablet that we reported on at the end of October based on various leaks was officially announced by Barnes & Noble on Wednesday morning. The seven-inch Android tablet will indeed sell for $49.99, making the it “the company’s most affordable Nook ever,” and it will include full access to the Google Play store. BN says the devices will be available in stores as of November 25 (“Black Friday”). While the device gives BN a competitor to Amazon’s cheapest Fire tablet, at the same Amazon announced their own Black Friday deals over the week leading up to […]