Picking up on a program begun at Amazon.UK (with a letter from Harper UK ceo VIctoria Barnsley), Amazon.com in the US today launched an Inside Publishing promotion. And who better to take the lead for our business than Houghton Harcourt Mifflin trade and reference president Gary Gentel, right? He begins: “Dear Amazon Customers: Even as the winds of change swirl around us this Election year, some things never change. Among them is the perennial fascination with the subjects of family, betrayal, social status, and money.” Gentel goes on to recommend Meryl Gordon’s Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of a […]
Amazon
Amazon Launches iPhone Shopping App; Stanza Reads 40,000 More Titles
Amazon has launched an iPhone app to let users search and browse the site for products. Their big “twist” is an “experimental feature” using the built-in camera called Amazon Remembers. It’s basically another extension of the idea of using physical stores as a place to browse real products to help people decide what to buy online. You snap a photo of a product and Amazon “tries to find products similar to the ones in the photos. As soon as the customer receives the results, they can then purchase the item immediately or ‘remember it’ for later in their Amazon account.”Release […]
No More Kindles for X-Mas
Amazon is sold out of Kindles and is saying that it will take “11 to 13 weeks” to ship new orders. A notice on the site says, “Due to heavy customer demand, Kindle is sold out.” As ever, theories abound, while facts are few. Did Oprah drive more sales than expected? Are they letting the current version of the Kindle sell out while they prepare to replace it with Kindle 2.0?Silicon Alley Insider In other e-news, the Christian Science Monitor blogs about Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s program of about 15 books formatted for the iPhone. They are working with ScrollMotion, a […]
Amazon/Penguin Contest Returns
The e-tailer’s Breakthrough Novel Award competition will return for a second year, open to new manuscript submissions as of Groundhog’s Day, 2009, and once again they will partner with the Penguin Group. Amazon calls the first contest “enormously successful,” despite the tepid response from the marketplace to the August release of winner Bill Loehfelm’s FRESH KILLS. (Loehfelm’s book has sold approximately 4,000 copies through outlets tracked by Nielsen Bookscan.) But Penguin has acquired rights to four of the other ten finalists: Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan (Amy Einhorn Books, July 2009); The Wet Nurse’s Tale by Erica Eisdorfer (Putnam, […]
Let's Play the Amazon Guessing Game
How can we get a handle on what Amazon’s mysterious Kindle statistic–a unit-based percentage of a percentage of titles, where books comprise an unspecified percentage of overall media sales–actually looks like? Given all the variables it’s very hard, but below is one potential formula, and you can adjust the assumptions as you wish. As reported above, North American sales for all media for the quarter were $1.245 billion. At the closest roughly comparable businesses, Barnes & Noble and Borders, book sales tend to comprise 70 to 60 percent of total sales. Let’s be conservative and start with 70 percent, which […]
Amazon.com to Buy AbeBooks
Amazon can lay ever-bigger claim to being the largest independent bookseller in the world with today’s news that the etailer has agreed to acquire AbeBooks. The online marketplace says it offers “over 110 million primarily used, rare and out-of-print books listed for sale by thousands of independent booksellers from around the world.“ Amazon vp of books Russell Grandinetti says, “As a leader in rare and hard-to-find books, AbeBooks brings added breadth and expanded selection to our customers worldwide. AbeBooks provides a wide range of services to both sellers and customers, and we look forward to working with them to further […]