GW ePublishing

Amazon started life as a book retailer, and as a book retailer they made books cheaper. Then they were pioneers in the e-book industry where they made books cheaper. Their recently announced plan to give readers free e-book copies of books they buy in physical form doesn't make books cheaper per se, but it does give readers greater value for their book-buying dollar. This is all great stuff. But not everyone agrees. Emily Gould complains that "When ebooks and pbooks are bundled, the ebooks are sold at a loss. That's authors', publishers' and, associatively, non-AMZN retailers' loss" and "frustrating we have to keep explaining that ebook production is not free. digital objects are not made by elves."

A correction(?) to the previously posted not by Nicholas Carr on the flattening of e-book sales.

Nicholas Carr on the prospects for print publications.

Interesting piece on the challenges for first time authors

If you want to understand the modern academy, it wouldn't hurt to start at "impact factor." Every year, the company Thomson Reuters assigns every academic journal an "impact factor." Impact factors measure, roughly, how often papers published in one journal are cited by other journals. It is an ecological measurement, in other words.

xulon publishing

Apple got some good news Tuesday afternoon, as Judge Denise Cote significantly lightened the proposed injunctive relief the company will face after being found liable in its e-book price fixing trial.

If your novel isn't by someone famous, won't receive a star in Publishers Weekly, or can't generate a slavish "At Home" featurette in That Other East Coast Newspaper, how do you get someone in the media to notice it? Swag, of course.

Interesting reaction from the ABA to Amazon-as-job-creator speech given by the President.

Interesting commentary on the the ruling against Apple on e-book pricing.

Courts rule against Apple for colluding to raise e-book prices.  This will be a win for Amazon and loss for publishers.

An interesting hypothesis on how B&N is faring in the digital age.

An illustration of the dangers of concentration of power in a market.  After pummeling the competition, Amazon acts more like a monopolist. 

It's all just a little bit of history repeating...some of these quotes sounds awfully familiar these days WRT lamenting how no one writes or reads paper anymore because of the frenetic pace of life.

Conventional wisdom says that entrepreneurs who start a Web-based business will do so with VC money. Read enough stories of Internet ventures that enjoy lucrative exits in the millions (in some cases billions) of dollars, and it's easy to assume that the only path to success is to begin by securing deals with investors who are far less interested in helping a start-up build a substantial brand as they are in realizing a return as quickly as possible. Bootstrapping simply isn't sexy anymore. But for many start-up publishers, bootstrapping is a way of life, and VC money isn't an option.