Amazon ceo Jeff Bezos told the audience at the company’s annual meeting that their strategy for competing with Apple is the company looks to surge past Kindle in devices on the market is to stay focused on “serious reading households.” That strategy is said to drive the excuse for not adding a kolor Kindle any time soon. “Bezos said it would be easy to add a color LCD screen to the Kindle, but that it provided an inferior reading experience to the reflective E Ink Corp. technology that the device currently uses. As for color reflective screens, Mr. Bezos said […]
eNews
Data Says Most eReader Owners Will Pay More
Do consumers mean it when they say “I’ll never more than $9.99 for an ebook”? “That’s only half bullshit,” Michael Norris, senior analyst for Simba Information, told a full room at BEA. More than a third of people said they’d never pay more than $9.99 for an ebook, though three-quarters of people said they would if they “absolutely had to,” Norris said, quoting a survey on Kindle Nation Daily. If people invest in ebook readers, said Norris, they are not going to stop using them because the price of ebooks goes to $12.99 instead of $9.99. “Kindle users are very […]
Perseus Crowdsources Search for the 10 Hottest BEA Books
What does Perseus do for an encore after last year’s all-consuming Book: The Sequel BEA project in which they compiled a published a book live during the show? This year they are asking attendees to contribute their picks for the 10 most anticipated titles, across 10 different categories of books. Their publishing client The Daily Beast will cover results from the app on their site. And of course if your book is selected and you happen not to have digital distribution yet, Perseus’s Constellation will convert your book and arrange distribution. The app is available in Apple’s App Store, and […]
More Store (and Device) News As Len Riggio Admits "The store model is under pressure" and iPad Estimates Are Raised
With the rapid expansion of ebook market, the WSJ has a prominent story looking at the corollary of greatest concern in book publishing: to what extent will ebooks push bookstores out of business? (There is a self-reinforcing cycle in which, if rising ebook sales lead to store closings, still fewer print books will sold as result, further propelling ebook market share.) Barnes & Noble chairman Len Riggio concedes that “the store model is under pressure, whichever way you look at it.” Over the next three or four years, “Riggio says, a different, more diverse Barnes & Noble retail store will […]
eNews from the Publishers: Ballantine and Harlequin Try Digital Shorts that Connect to Longer Works; Sesame Street eBookstore Opens with Subscription plan
Ballantine will publish a 6,000-word digital short story from Steve Berry in September for $1.99 that bridges to his November 23 book release THE EMPEROR’S TOMB. The WSJ calls it “a literary appetizer, inexpensive enough to attract potential readers who might otherwise not be willing to buy a new novel from an author whose works they haven’t yet read.” Matt Schwartz at Random House says, “realistically, it would be hard to get something like this in print. But the e-book format is very flexible. What this does is offer an affordable entry point into Steve’s world.” In the press release, […]
From the eVendors: Libre Raises Another $8.1 Mil; Overdrive Debuts Consolidated Apps; Self-Publishing from BookMasters; Follett Integrates Moodle with CafeScribe
LibreDigital announced another round of financing, raising $8.1 million in a round led by new investor S3 Ventures, with participation from existing investors Adams Capital Management and Triangle Peak Partners. Libre has been in search of the right application of their technology for over ten years (when they started as Newsstand to provide digital copies of newspapers) and now they are riding the ramp up in the ebook market. CEO Russell Reeder says the funding “will be used to accelerate the delivery of e-books, and expand our technology offerings to include new solutions that help publishers better promote and sell […]