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,…
London, 1 May 2012 — The Alliance of Radical Booksellers has announced that Melville House‘s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber was the winner of the 2012 Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. As described on the Alliance’s website, the award, launched to mark…
More than half a million books were published in 2011. In the United States and beyond, the book industry is growing increasingly crowded. The bad news for publishers is fierce competition and a saturated marketplace. The good news is that public consumption has grown exponentially,…
In 2008 Melville House published for the first time in English a debut novel called Bonsai by Chilean author Alejandro Zambra. The book won Chile’s Literary Critics Award for Best Novel and now has been turned into a film directed by Cristian Jimenez. Before you…
MobyLives reported last week on Bryce Milligan, the publisher of Wings Press, an indie that’s represented by IPG and so caught in the IPG/Amazon ebook conflict. That report was inspired by a robust statement released by Milligan, saying that the publishing industry was in a…
MobyLives isn’t all that goes on at 145 Plymouth Street, DUMBO; there’s also that little thing of publishing books. The Economist recently came to interview Melville House co-founder and co-publisher Dennis Johnson. Talking about the experience of becoming a publisher after a career as an artist, Dennis says:…
An indie publisher has added his voice to the growing number of public opponents of Amazon. In his article ‘Amazon’s Assault on Intellectual Freedom’, Bryce Milligan of Wings Press in San Antonio, Texas, calls the stand-off between IPG and Amazon an ‘undeclared war’. He continues:…
Amazon.com’s siege of the over 400 independent publishers distributed by the Independent Publishers Group hasn’t been in the news much lately because there haven’t been any new developments since the first few days after the giant retailer pulled the buy buttons on some 5,000 ebooks…
Biographer and editor James Atlas, who has acquired books for HarperCollins, Penguin, and WW Norton and later published an independent list at Atlas & Co., has teamed up with Amazon Publishing to publish a new series, Amazon Lives, expected to launch in June 2013. Atlas…
One of publishing’s smartest and most-watched publishers yesterday announced he was “breaking the Amazon habit,” in large part because of the attack by Amazon against the Independent Publishers Group (IPG). In a blog post called “Why I’m Breaking the Amazon Habit … And Why You…
