A battle between the publishing side and the retail side is forming overseas. Amazon has stopped selling new copies of some Hackette Livre UK’s most popular titles such as books from Stephen King, James Patterson, and Alexander McCall Smith. Amazon lists the books but the only way to order the book is through [...]

Mobile Read has a couple of articles on the new debate of whether Amazon, rather than Barnes and Noble, should acquire Borders. William Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management says aye (and Pershing has a 10% stake in Boders Group Inc) and Rich Aristotle Munarriz of the Motley Fool says nay. From a [...]

Usually when Amazon reviews are penned by the family members, it is done so with the intent to bolster star rankings but maybe the most effective Amazon reviews are ones that generate controversy which in turns stir booksales.
According to GalleyCat, Rachel Sontag wrote a memoir, House Rules, about growing up with an emotionally abusive father [...]

Jeff Bezos refuses to divulge how many Kindles Amazon has sold but he claims that the Kindle sales make up more than 6% of total Amazon book sales. In response to questions from Mossberg about why ebooks, Bezos talks about the value added component of ebooks such as dictionary lookup or change in font [...]

Sramana Mitra writes in a recent article that an Amazon Monopoly that eliminates the editors, agents, distributors, and everyone else that stands between Amazon and the customer (other than the author) can actually improve publishing and increase the monetary benefit to the author. The suggestion is that by eliminating the middleman, it frees up [...]

Overstock.com is joining Amazon in suing New York state for its recently implemented tax law which would require online retailers who make sales to NY state residents to collect NY state taxes. Amazon filed suit in late April. Personally, I think tax strategies like this hurt the state more than help it because [...]

276,649 new titles and editions were printed in 2007 which is a 1% increase over the previous year. Print on Demand books increased from 21,936 titles to 134,773 titles per year. It’s no wonder that Amazon is flexing its market power with requiring POD authors and publishers to use its own POD service, [...]

SB Sarah got a heads up from a Janet Evanovich fan that early reviews were disappearing from the Barnes and Noble site. Of course, the only deleted reviews were the negative ones. Google cache which preserves snapshots of past versions of a webpage showed at least two negative reviews that are nowhere to [...]

SB Sarah posted about the new antitrust lawsuit filed by publisher Booklocker against Amazon. Booklocker is asking for class action status. The suit alleges an unlawful tying arrangement between Amazon’s bookstore and Amazon’s printing arm (Booksurge).
We discussed a tying suit briefly in the comments when the news of Amazon’s requirement to use its [...]

It has been said by many an author that their sales at Amazon account for only a small (mostly single digit percentage) of overall sales. Yet, it’s growing sales is causing concern amongst publishers. Amazon’s sales have grown each quarter by leaps and bounds. The first quarter of ‘08 say a 22% [...]

In one of the industry news pieces I did this past week was a report of Amazon challenging New York State’s intent to impose a sales tax on internet sales. A commenter indicated that this was good because it helped to encourage people to shop locally.
On the surface, this argument is compelling. Force [...]

Amazon wants to be Queen of the World (TM Titanic) and is miffed that publishers in the UK are encouraging consumers to buy directly from the publishers’ sites. To entice readers to buy direct, the publishers are undercutting the prices of the books available at Amazon. This makes perfect sense to me as [...]

We have not dropped this. Our petition is up to 644 signatures and we are still planning on sending the printed version to both Amazon and the Washington State AG’s office. We actually received a response, albeit a form one, from Amazon yesterday. While this isn’t the response that we want to [...]

I hate online sales tax so I am totally biased against New York’s decision to start charging online retailers to collect state tax. Amazon has decided to challenge this in court arguing that the State of New York lacks jurisdiction to collect sales tax from Amazon on the basis that because of its lack [...]

I tried to re-open the Dear Author forum, but am having technical difficulties. Instead, I’ll sticky this post for a week. I got the forum working but I had to start anew. I’ve had some inquiries about what people can do to in response to Amazon’s treatment of Reba Belle. [...]

Most of the blogosphere has been mouth agape in reaction to the Deborah Anne MacGillivray harassment of an Amazon reader over a 3 star review that the reader left for a book of MacGillivray’s. In my link backs, though, I saw a post called “Authors Who Bite Back” from Tess Gerritsen’s blog that left [...]

Dear Amazon:
Perhaps you know that there was a bit of scandal involving the Amazon review system that erupted in the past couple of weeks. An author, Deborah MacGillivray, was found to have been the leader of a group of people who worked systematically to make their reviews the top rated ones and to get negative [...]

Amazon makes it so easy to buy things. According to a new press release, Amazon TextBuyIt program was released on Tuesday. It’s not as easy as texting. The whole process includes a few back and forth between you and Amazon:

You text the product name, description, UPC or ISBN to Amazon (262966) to [...]

So, this Amazon thing. It sounds bad. For those who might have missed it, Amazon decided to stop stocking Print on Demand books that do not use Amazon’s own service, Booksurge. I’m not sure who falls under a Print on Demand service. I have always viewed PODs as any publisher who [...]

In what I like to think of as the “cock block” Amazon has said to self published authors that only those POD books that use Amazon’s POD service will be for sale through Amazon. Before, if you were a POD, you could have your books fulfilled by Lulu.com or any other POD service. [...]

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer wants Amazon to start paying sales taxes on the sales it makes in New York. Spitzer believes it will level the playing field with those companies that reside in New York that compete against Amazon and already pay sales taxes.
Plus on a side note it would mean much more [...]

From Publishers Weekly:
The Publishers Weekly Stock Index managed to eke out a 1.7% increase last year, thanks largely to Amazon.com. Shares soared nearly 135% while the stock fortunes of traditional book stores fared much worse, particularly Borders Group, which lost half of it’s value in 2007. Even bookstore leader Barnes & [...]

It’s books, not gadgets, that is the top selling product online across the world.  According to a new Nielsen report, 41% of internet users worldwide (48 countries) and 38% of US internet users (estimated 57.5 million) buy books online.
Nielsen expects this number to grow.   Foner Books sales statistics show that 2007 sales numbers for [...]

The Amazon Kindle’s amazing wireless content delivery system relies on Sprint’s EVDO which has great coverage in urban areas and the East Coast but not so great coverage in the Plains and rural areas. You might want to before you hop onto the $400 Kindle bandwagon.

I’ve been critical of the Amazon’s intention to spy on its Kindle customers, but it is nice to hear that whatever information it is gathering, it will try to keep it private. An investigation was undertaken by the federal government of Robert B. D’Angelo, culminating in a grand jury indictment against him for not [...]

Amazon’s pricing for mass market books has suddenly gone full retail, no discount since the release of the Kindle. When questioned in Newsweek about the low pricing, Bezos said “low-margin and high-volume sale—you just have to make sure the mix [between discounted and higher-priced items] works." It looks like Bezos is hoping to [...]

The Amazon Kindle is available for order. The price is $399 with free shipping. There are some author testimonials from people like James Patterson, Michael Lewis and Neil Gaiman who all extol the marvelous screen which you would think that Amazon invented. It did not. It’s eink technology and the Sony Reader [...]

Despite the fact that the PR gathering tomorrow was supposedly a secret, everyone on the internet knows that Amazon invited a number of publishing representatives and technology folks to New York for a PR event to take place on November 19. No details were given, but based on the people that were contacted and [...]

My eyebrows raised a bit when I read this article on Shelf Awareness this morning. On Tuesdays, Shelf Awareness shared the policy of Rainy Day Book’s, an independent bookstore in Kansas, to refuse to stage signings and readings for authors whose websites and emails have a book purchase link [...]

The rumors of the Amazon Kindle are reaching a fevered state (okay, maybe only in my mind) but I was thrilled for some reason when I read at Engadget that Kindle ebooks were showing up as “other formats”. I did a quick search and sure enough, every book that I know off that is [...]