PBS MediaShift has launched a new line of ebooks with How to Self-Publish Your Book and Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Cable TV, priced at $3.99 and $2.99, respectively and only available for Kindle and the iBookstore for now (though Nook will follow in due course.) Executive director Mark Glaser told paidContent that MediaShift intends to release 10 to 20 ebooks this year, depending on sales of the launch titles. “This is a test for us and PBS, so we will learn as we go and adjust prices, length, subject matter and more.” Last Friday Poynter looked at the ongoing ebook […]
eNews
Apple Wins One From Judge Cote
The ebook pricing case against Apple does not go before US District Court Judge Denise Cote until June 3, but the computer giant has just won another case presented to the same judge. Cote granted summary judgment in Apple’s favor in a trademark case brought by Brick Tower Press over the use of iBooks. The publisher had purchased the assets of Byron Preiss Visual Publications and Preiss’s iPicturebooks, which had published in the early days of commercial ebooks under the iBooks brand. But Judge Cote said Brick Tower’s only rights were in the original logo design, which pair the word […]
Higher Price Bands Make More Money for Self-Published Authors
Smashwords has published some findings derived analyzing the recent 11 months of sales (thrugh March 31) for 120,000 ebooks distributed by the company. Those sales represent $12 million in net receipts for authors and publishers (after Smashwords’ and retailers’ commissions; if you like math, you’ll find that means Smashwords collected about $2.2 million in distribution fees during that period). As usual, some of the prose is happy talk about the wonders of self-publishing — even though the first graph proves that a very small number of titles account for the vast amount of sales. (Their No. 1 selling title outsold […]
Report of Microsoft Offer to Buy Nook’s Digital Business Drives BN Shares
Wednesday night TechCrunch claimed to have obtained internal documents in which “Microsoft is offering to pay $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media LLC.” — and the stock market responded Thursday morning with a jump in Barnes & Noble’s stock. It opened up more than 25 percent or about $4.60 a share but has settled over the next 90 minutes, up about $3 a share. Prior to the report, BN’s entire market cap was just over $1 billion. But the TC piece is full of errors and oddities, starting with the belief that Nook Media “also includes […]
Briefs: Court Hears Google Authors Guild Appeal, and More
For avid court watchers, this morning the Federal Court of Appeals was scheduled to hear oral arguments in the fight over whether to certify the author class in the long-running suit brought by the Authors Guild over Google‘s book scanning. Last year Judge Denny Chin approved certification of the class, and Google appealed that decision. We’re going to spare you further details until the court rules. Sony, which has sold its Reader devices in Australia for some time, has finally opened a Reader ebookstore there to go along with those devices. Price cuts on a variety of Nook devices — […]
Awards and More
Benjamin Alire Saenz, 58, became the first Latino writer to win the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize on Saturday, for EVERYTHING BEGINS AND ENDS AT THE KENTUCKY CLUB. Published by Cinco Puntos, it’s a collection of seven loosely linked stories. After putting Charlie Lovett‘s forthcoming THE BOOKMAN’S TALE: A Novel of Obsession on their Best Books of May list last week, now Barnes & Noble has made the book their latest B&N Recommends selection. HCI’s former licensing and subsidiary rights director Christian Blonshine has been named executive vice president. Brenda Knight has moved up to publisher of both Cleis Press and Viva […]