The online writing community announced Monday that they are following in the footsteps of Wattpad BookCountry.
Later this month BookRix will be launching an ebookstore where member authors can sell the fruits of their labors, and BookRix is also going to offer to distribute those ebooks to Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks.
But also like BookCountry, this doesn’t look like a very good deal for authors.
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Hard on the heels of the news that B&N won’t stock books published by Amazon is this moment of temporary insanity. Publisher’s Weekly has confirmation from a senior manager at Books-a-Million that this 250-strong bookstore chainis following in B&N’s footsteps.
Specifically, they won’t carry any of the books distributed by HMH under the New Harvest imprint. This imprint was launched as part of an expansion of Amazon’s partnership with HMH. And yes, this is a stupid move.
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Jason Chen, formerly of Gizmodo (the stolen iPhone guy), is bout to launch a new ebook startup called StoryBundle. This new ebook seller was inspired by the pay what you want Humble Indie Bundles, and he plans to do for ebooks what Humble Indie did for apps. [Read more →]
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Yesterday Amazon released their year end financial statements, and the news was both good (sales were up) and bad (profits were down). But one notable absence from the news report was ny mention of ebook sales. Yes, Amazon said that they sold million so of Kindles, but how many ebooks?
Well, The Bookseller followed up on this and they have some stats for the UK Kindle Store, and the news is mixed.
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You may have noticed today that the Waterstones-B&N rumors have made a resurgence. Today’s round of rumors doesn’t add anything that we hadn’t heard the last time around, and to be honest I think we ll pretty much assume them to be true.
But have you considered that Waterstones might not be the best choice for a first partner? I know it sounds crazy, but I think Indigo, the largest bookstore chain in Canada, might be a good alternative.
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Have you heard of Booklr? This is a market research firm that is focused entirely on books. Sign up with their service and you can get pricing data on virtually any title published in the US.
Earlier this week they posted an infographic which compared the Top 100 titles in the Nook and Kindle stores. Amazon bet B&n in several ways, including lower average price ($6.48 vs $8.94), s well as having far more titles under $2 (35 vs zero). It’s fascinating comparison.
The infographic is after the break.
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It looks like Kobo’s expansion into the Dutch ebook market has firmed up a little in the past month; they’ve just announced a new retail partner for the Kobo Touch.
Netherlands based bookseller Libris will be carrying the KT on 30 January, with retail of 129 euros. You”ll be able to find the KT both on their website and in stores, long with selection of covers. They will also be Kobo’s ebookstore partner in the Netherlands.
Kobo has in fact been carrying Dutch ebooks since mid-2011, and they have been selling them since December 2011. That makes today’s launch a tad anti-climatic.
I would appreciate it if someone could check the Dutch Kobo store and tell me how many titles are available; their website won’t show them to me because I’m in the US.
Update: Kobo has a policy of not showing ebooks to customers if the customer cannot buy them. That is wht I ws referring to.
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A couple months back WHSmith, one of the larger UK bookstore chains, announced that they were switching their ebookstore over to Kobo. The switch actually happened some time back, but I was reminded about it today.
Most of WHSmith’s customers saw their accounts switched over to Kobo. But this was a less than complete process, and at least some of us were moved to another service, only this one is no longer associated with WHSmiths. I’m not completely sure why this happened, but I do know that my account was moved over and I hate the name.
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One thing you can say about Apple: they don’t do launches as half measures.
In addition to the new iBooks, Apple also announced today that iTunes U, their educational audiobook and video section of iTunes, now has its own app. The app was actually released yesterday, but clearly we all missed it.
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Amazon announced today that they were making the tools and specs for their new ebook format available to the public. You can go download the files now, and start making ebooks that only work properly on the Kindle Fire.
Sorry, but given the excitement this will generate I thought it best to puncture the hype.
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