In a Publishers Weekly opinion essay, indie publisher John Oakes of OR Books argues that publishers can best fight Amazon by cutting them out of the equation entirely and selling books direct to their customers. Oakes argues that battling with Amazon over terms of sale,…
When the Pulitzer Prize board decided not to present an award for fiction last month, independent bookstores were frustrated at the lack of a winner, which would usually give them a sales boost from readers seeking out the year’s big winner (GalleyCat posted a roundup…
Sad news for Parisian anglophones: The famed English-language bookshop The Village Voice is closing its doors July 31st, according to this report on the American Library in Paris website. While every American tourist knows about the historic Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop, owned by Sylvia Beach,…
Days after the Authors Guild and the American Booksellers Association (ABA) announced their support for the agency pricing model devised by five of the Big Six publishers and Apple — a development which has brought on the threat of a lawsuit from the Department of…
In one of the most muddled, disorganized, deceitful and cynical series of policy shifts in recent business history, Google has once again announced that it is ending its partnership selling ebooks with independent booksellers — except this time, the company says it really means it.…
After innumerable stories about Amazon simply refusing to obey the law and collect sales taxes, along comes perhaps the most delicious bit of news since that bit of belligerence whereby Amazon offered people actual cash to commit corporate espionage: the country known as France has…
Over on The Bookseller‘s blog, a big-name UK agent, Jonny Geller, has put together an ‘agent’s manifesto’, to redress the current problems in the publishing industry. It reads: » The author is the expert. Why assume that the one person who has spent the past…
One of the country’s leading independent bookstores has announced it will be joining Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Canada’s Chapters Indigo in boycotting books published by Amazon.com. According to a report by Stacie Spring for the local East Valley Tribune, Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe,…
In one of the most transparent fibs of the year, and amidst a wash of bad publicity, Google announced yesterday that it hadn’t meant to kick numerous indie booksellers out of its Google eBook affiliates program, it meant to — um, well, they didn’t say.…
Late last week came the news that Google was closing out an undisclosed number of its eBookstore affiliate partners. This is perhaps the beginning of the final chapter in the long and underwhelming tale of the Google eBookstore venture. It is a tale that would be…
