data crunch

Photo: Karlos J. Afonso, DeviantArt

"Amazon is now letting indie bookstores sell its Kindle tablets, and as you might expect, the online giant paints this new program as the best of both worlds: Customers get Kindles, and the stores get a 10 percent cut when customers use the tablet to buy books. […]

     For Becky Anderson, proprietor of Anderson’s Bookshop outside Chicago and immediate past president of the American Booksellers Association, Amazon owes indies much more for what she describes as the retail giant’s 'free-riding' on the marketing and community engagement provided by small brick-and-mortar shops. 'I could not imagine partnering with them on anything. They try to undercut everything we do,' Anderson says. 'To me, this is insulting.'"
— Marcus Wohlson, Wired
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"[…] When I had to read more than a hundred novels for the Man Booker Prize last year, the most obvious thing was to keep them with me on the Kindle 3 that all members of the jury were given for the purpose. But I found myself becoming so impatient with the device that I worried whether it was influencing my view of the writing; the only way to judge the books fairly, I felt, was to read them all on printed pages.
     In my experience, it’s an essential component of reading that one should be able to see around the corner. With a Kindle, Jane Austen would never have been able to make a joke like the one she drops in at the end of Northanger Abbey, nodding to her readers about the novel nearly being at an end: readers, she wrote, 'will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.'
     This is not a technophobe’s problem; it’s one that technology needs to solve. And it is – I would venture – the reason why ebook sales have slowed among those who were the first to catch on."
— Gaby Wood, The Telegraph
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not dead yet

From: Breathing Books

"Although some reports from the consumer press may have overstated the health of the independent book business—the AP’s Hillel Italie used the term 'growth industry'—booksellers at this year’s BookExpo America do seem in better spirits. And with good reason: for starters, the numbers are there. The ABA [American Booksellers Association] reported an uptick in membership for the fourth straight year, and ABA CEO Oren Teicher said that the independent channel saw a gain of 8% from the previous year.

     Beyond those gains, though, the cheerier mood seems, as many industry members told PW from the show floor, due in large part to a sense that the digital business has leveled off. After years of concern—at times panic—that e-books would replace print books and, in turn, wipe out bricks-and-mortar bookstores altogether, there is a sense that print and digital can, and will, coexist. Or as Perseus Books Group’s CEO David Steinberger put it, for the first time in a few years 'the future doesn’t feel like it’s changing that rapidly.'”
— Rachel Deahl, Publishers Weekly
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Why do e-book outfits love the letter 'K'? (Part 1)

From: Sesame Street
via The Official Cranberries Fanblog

"Looking to keep pace with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and the fast growing self-publishing market in general, Barnes & Noble is phasing out its PubIt! self-publishing service and relaunching it as Nook Press, an upgraded e-book self-publishing platform offering an array of new services to authors and publishers. B&N is partnering with the self-publishing platform Fast Pencil to supply Nook Press with its proprietary online authoring technology, while also offering Fast Pencil authors access to a variety of marketing opportunities via B&N’s Nook platform. […]

     Much like PubIt!, Nook Press will pay authors up to 65% of the e-book list price based on how much an author wants to charge for a book. The Nook Press platform is nonexclusive (authors and publishers can sell the e-book where they want) and, like PubIt!, Nook Press is free of charge and B&N takes a percentage of the list price when the books sell."
— Publishers Weekly
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Oops, sorry... wrong "Kobo" (photo from: kapok.com)

"Kobo, a small Canadian ebook and e-reading company now owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, kicked Google’s butt… when it comes to selling ebooks through independent bookstores, that is. […]
     The reason the program existed in the first place was to give independent bookstores a way to get involved in the growing market of ebooks and digital reading, to give them a chance to survive the ebook revolution.
     After Google announced that it was cancelling its program this past spring, Kobo swooped in and signed a deal with the American Booksellers Association to provide e-readers, tablets and ebooks for them to sell.
     In the first month of the Kobo partnership (Oct. last year), independent bookstores sold more ebooks than in the entire two years working with Google. The key, say bookstore owners, is being able to sell the devices along with the ebooks. It just makes more sense to customers."
— Jeremy Greenfield, Forbes
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