Mar
27
…Mike Zatzkin, a lucid observer of—and commentator on—the publishing industry, has an interesting dialoge on his March 18th blog regarding the current and future predicament of e-books. Check it out: The Idea Logical Blog.
Mar
23
Still Hungry for Books
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Edward Nawotka, in a March 16 Publishers Weekly article, writes about the contrast observable at the Spring Book Show, a remainders show held in early March in Atlanta.
There are plenty of remainders available because of huge returns due to a weak Christmas season. Savvy retailers were scarfing up bargains by the pallet load, yet he reports that attendance at the show was off 25 percent and that “largely absent were…independent booksellers.”
One retail bookseller at the show said he’d recently bought five skids of books for $0.12 each including delivery. When they landed he held a sale, offering them still in the boxes, for $1.99 to $2.99. He sold 1,500 in an hour and a half. He said those 90 minutes paid for the books and “everything after that was profit.”
Apparently readers still want to read.
I’ve long maintained that independent bookstore owners need to get more aggressive and use every strategy available to them to compete with the chains. Buying books at $0.12 each and selling them for $2 to $3 might be one to look into.
As an aside: Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that a recent Gallop poll shows only 39 percent of Americans believe in evolution. There’s a short story in that.
Mar
4
The Ever-Changing Publishing Industry
Filed Under Books, Publishing | Leave a Comment
A few interesting moves in the book publishing industry this week.
First, Thomas Nelson has begun a program called NelsonFree in which the price of a hardcover book also includes an audio download and an e-book download. The downloads will be available in MP3 format for audio and a number of e-book formats including EPub, the odds-on favorite right now over PDF or various proprietory formats to become the eventual universal format for e-readers. This is a savy move that will help brick and mortar bookstores compete with online stores.
Speaking of e-readers, Amazon.com came underfire recently because the new version Kindle has the ability to read text outloud. The Authors Guild and others felt this interferred with audio rights which are usually licensed separately. This week Amazon backed off and said the rights holders—authors or publishers—would be able to choose if they wanted this feature to be turned off on individual books.
The National Federation for the Blind opposed this, but most publishers automatically allow their books to be translated into Braille without charge and I’m sure a special arrangement for the sight-impaired can be worked out—and should be.
Finally, under the subtitle: Another One Sells Out to the Big Boys, Berkeley’s Ten Speed Press—a well-thought-of successful independent publisher—has been sold to Random House. At last count, I think Random House owned somthing like 375 of the largest book imprints in the nation. Random House in turn is owned by Germany-based Bertelsmann AG.
The more consolidation of imprints into the big publishing houses, the better for independent publishers such as Quill Driver Books.
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