Amazon and Macmillan reached an agreement on e-book pricing, a pact that may serve as a model with other publishing companies. Amazon resumed selling Macmillan titles." />
Simon & Schuster plans to postpone the release of 35 e-book titles by four months. This is in part attributed to the sales of Stephen King's "Under the Dome" in which the publisher noticed that e-book sales were cannibalizing hardcover sales.
Marvell and E Ink team up to improve e-readers. Their new integrated processor will reduce the screen refresh rate from three seconds to less than one second and will eliminate the "blackout" effect with page turns.
This post was originally published on the Frankfurt Bookfair blog on 11th August. Reposted here with kind permission from its author, Huw Alexander, Rights & Digital Sales Manager for SAGE in London. EveryThink: What do you think, Huw Alexander? We think that e-books are a playground for publishers - and not a necessary evil.
Random House is the only major publisher whose titles cannot be bought directly from Apple's iBooks application, having resisted the new pricing model that Apple offered publishers for the iPad." />
Perhaps the most revealing thing about the "Dumb Money" story, in fact, is that everyone involved -- author, agent and publisher -- saw it as an experiment, the kind of small-scale trial run that a late-adopting industry needs to do a lot more of.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about the "Dumb Money" story, in fact, is that everyone involved -- author, agent and publisher -- saw it as an experiment, the kind of small-scale trial run that a late-adopting industry needs to do a lot more of.
How the same? Claiming it doesn't make it so. And books cost more than 99 cents; ten dollars is not, in Graham's terms, an ignorable event.
But though I can't predict
specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When
you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give
people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're
probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's
merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some
existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser.
In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers
weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they
were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always
depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?
If audiences were willing to pay more for better content, why wasn't
anyone already selling it to them?
E-books are cheaper to produce than print volumes, but consumers may not realize that expenses like overhead and royalties are still in effect, publishers say.
Publishers and e-book sellers are working through glitches and confusion as they adopt a new model for pricing ahead of Saturday's debut of the iPad." />