eNews

Hay House is the latest publisher to partner with Author Solutions in starting a self-publishing line. Their new Balboa Press line will focus on authors wanted to publish self-help books. As is standard in these models, Hay House promises to “monitor” the paid-for books. CEO Reid Tracy says, “While these books won’t be published by Hay House, Balboa Press will be monitored for success, and hopefully we’ll find the Hay House authors of the future.” And for $15,000, participants can buy a money-saving Hay House Recommends promotional package. Release HarperCollins is back in business with ebookstores that rely on wholesalers, […]

The Boston Consulting Group conducted an extensive online survey of 13,000 people in 14 countries to understand their e-reading desires and came away concluding that the idea device is a low-priced tablet. “Globally, 66 percent of respondents would prefer to buy a multipurpose device, whereas only 24 percent prefer a single-function device, such as the Kindle.” An impressive 28 percent of respondents expect to buy an ereader or tablet in the next year. Just under half of those surveyed intend to buy a tablet within the next three years. And a significant ninety percent of survey participants said they would […]

It was just a year ago that Amazon surprised publishing executives when previewing the SuperKindle by announcing that Kindle sales had spiked to “35 percent of books where we have Kindle editions.” With this year’s launch of the iPad and Apple’s iBookstore, however, everyone has been quite focused on assessing the impact of this new entrant in the accelerating overall ebook market. Apple’s announced numbers of over one million devices and 1.5 million ebooks downloaded so far sound strong, albeit vague. On the device level, working from reasonable postulations you can view the iPad launch as boosting the market for […]

Google has finally made public their decision on identifiers for products sold through Google Editions. They will use the industry-standard ISBN–as opposed to vendors like Amazon, who assign their own unique ASINs to Kindle books. Google hopes that publishers will assign unique ISBNs to their Google Editions products on their own, but if they don’t, Google will assign numbers themselves in an agreement announced today with US ISBN agency Bowker. Google’s Tom Turvey says in the announcement “this decision was driven by the book industry’s strong reliance on the ISBN along with our partner-centric business and distribution models. We look […]