Vancouver’s Shelfie program adds Harvard Book Store to the list of cooperative books points in which ebooks are being bundled with print editions. Read More
AuthorEarnings: ISBN On Ice!
Everything’s Coming Up Indie. Right? As slippery as the business of publishing-industry statistics is, the author Hugh Howey and his unnamed associate referred to as Data Guy have now given us a year of AuthorEarnings.com reports. This is a good thing. Despite Howey’s detractors and some of their misgivings, the AuthorEarnings series of interpretive essays have… Read More
A HarperCollins Holiday Pop-Up Bookstore: ‘Innovation-Driven Environment’
Lean, Light, And Timely On New Year’s Eve, it will be history. The Holiday Pop-Up Store closes at midnight Eastern on December 31. But it will have been another of the tests that HarperCollins (HC) has launched, as it sifts through various avenues of D2C potential — direct to consumer. You still can access the store… Read More
'Retail stonewalling' and Amazon sightings in bookstores
Oil and water…The general pattern, of course, has been simple: many bookshops, objecting to Amazon’s effects on the industry, have declined to carry books from Amazon Publishing imprints. A kind of major-player blessing on independent stores has been provided by Barnes & Noble’s corporate stance, announced January 2012, against Amazon Publishing books. So frustrated with the situation was Amazon… Read More
A perfect e-bookstore? "Maybe each one of us"
“To build our own vision of ebook nirvana”… It’s not that Chris Kubica and his “perfect e-bookstore” associates didn’t know the task was difficult. “There are key things that ‘walled garden’ for-profit ebook sellers will never willingly give us,” he told me during our #PorterMeets interview. …But then: A strange thing happened: we pulled back. We second-guessed. We found… Read More
EXTRA ETHER: Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Banning
Writing on the Ether is a collection of news and perspectives on publishing. It is written by journalist and critic Porter Anderson for Jane Friedman and it appears at JaneFriedman.com each Thursday. Sponsorship opportunities are available and offer generous promotion. Join us on Tuesdays at Ed Nawotka’s and Frankfurt Book Fair’s Publishing Perspectives for the new Ether for Authors column. Read More