Amazon vs Hachette

Stephen King, Donna Tartt, John Grisham og mer enn 900 andre forfattere gikk i en helsides annonse i New York Times til angrep på Amazon. Annonsen, som også finnes på nettsiden authorsunited.net. Amazon nå opprettet siden readersunited.com.

Forfatterne mener Amazon de siste månedene har gått til flere grep mot Hachettes forfattere, som dermed ufrivillig har havnet i midten av konflikten.

Ifølge The Verge ønsker Amazon å selge mesteparten av e-bøkene for 9,99 dollar, eller litt over 60 kroner. Nå ligger prisene på e-bøker på mellom 14,99 og 19,99 dollar, noe Amazon mener er for høyt.

Kilde: DN.no

Amazon satser mer på nettbrett

Amazon har solgt nesten fire millioner eksemplarer av Kindle Fire, som ligger nær opp til nettbrett som Galaxy Tab og iPad i funksjonalitet og skjermkvalitet, men til en langt lavere pris.

Amazons bestillinger av e-blekkskjermer fra selskapet E-ink har sank med 62 prosent i februar, sammenlignet med februar i fjor.

Det burde være en klar nok indikasjon på at Amazon er gir full gass i nettbrettmarkrdet, og ikke nøyer seg med en nisje av bokormer.

Kilde: ITavisen

How Barnes & Noble Can Take a Bite Out of Amazon

Barnes & Noble’s strategy is to do everything that Amazon does, but to do it later. It’s rare in corporate America that a management fights so hard to be #2. This is not the same thing as the Avis car rental company’s media strategy of old: “We’re #2, so we have to try harder.” At the time of the Avis campaign, Avis was in fact tied for #2 with National Car Rental, behind #1 Hertz. Avis’s target was National, not Hertz. It was a winner. But the B&N strategy is of a different kind, a deliberate effort to be second best.

I happen to believe that B&N’s position is better than many pundits would have it. Comparing B&N to Borders is a mistake; Borders was a shipwreck even in a strong economy. B&N has displayed great skill in managing its bricks-and-mortar stores and has surprised everyone by coming from behind and grabbing 25% of the e-book market. B&N has also attracted investment from Liberty Media, which could help in getting the kind of media properties it feels it needs for the Nook tablet, though that in itself may not help it with its book business.

The Scholarly Kitchen

Amazon Publishing Expands into Children's Books

In an aggressive expansion into children's publishing, Amazon has acquired over 450 children's titles originally published by Marshall Cavendish. The deal will bring a children's category into the fold at Amazon Publishing, where, up until now, genre units, in categories like mystery and romance, have been built exclusively around adult titles. Amazon, at press time, had not announced the name of a specific children's imprint at its publishing operation, or who might head that imprint which will be part of Amazon Publishing's East Coast Group headed by Larry Kirshbaum.

Publishers Weekly

Amazon's Kindle Fire Has Just Made Every Other Android Tablet Manufacturer Look Bad

David Ruddock on Amazon Kindle:

So, why hasn't anyone else built anything like this? I think the plain truth here is that no one else could build a tablet like this (even Google), because no one else does what Amazon does. Its massive EC2 cloud computing and content delivery network along with a huge library of movies, TV shows (which has recently added free streaming Fox shows for Prime members), music, and books makes it a digital media mega-giant. The Kindle app for Android is pretty decent, and Amazon MP3 isn't shabby, either - but I always wondered why Amazon hadn't announced plans for an Android Amazon Instant Video app. And now I know.

It will be interesting to see if Amazon keeps Instant Video limited to the Kindle Fire - which seems very likely to happen because of licensing and DRM concerns.
Amazon can also justify what is likely a razor-thin profit margin on the Fire's hardware with the fact that almost every single person who buys one will be giving Amazon essentially overhead-free content revenue through their purchases of books, movies, and music.

Why else would you buy one? And yes, as a side note, I understand the hacking community will have a very large interest in this thing, but they're a minority, and not really relevant to this part of the discussion.

Finally, Amazon's developers can optimize the user experience to exacting standards, because they know exactly what software the device will run for most tasks. This is a massive advantage over Honeycomb tablets, where manufacturers rely on Android to keep the user experience sailing smoothly for the most part, because 3rd party apps are doing the work. By writing its own apps (and using an open-source version of Android), and knowing the exact hardware they'll be running on, Amazon can tweak and tinker every aspect of the basic user experience to its satisfaction. No other Android tablet maker that is a real market player, aside from Barnes & Noble, has really done that. So, where does that leave those other Android tablet makers?

Androidpolice.com

Amazon Rewrites the Rules of Book Publishing

Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.

It has set up a flagship line run by a publishing veteran, Laurence Kirshbaum, to bring out brand-name fiction and nonfiction. It signed its first deal with the self-help author Tim Ferriss. Last week it announced a memoir by the actress and director Penny Marshall, for which it paid $800,000, a person with direct knowledge of the deal said.

Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.

Several large publishers declined to speak on the record about Amazon’s efforts. “Publishers are terrified and don’t know what to do,” said Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who is known for speaking his mind.

NYTimes.com

Amazon Silk

Amazon introduced Silk, an all-new web browser powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and available exclusively on the just announced Kindle Fire. You might be asking, “A browser? Do we really need another one?” As you’ll see in the video below, Silk isn’t just another browser. We sought from the start to tap into the power and capabilities of the AWS infrastructure to overcome the limitations of typical mobile browsers.



Instead of a device-siloed software application, Amazon Silk deploys a split-architecture. All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely. In short, Amazon Silk extends the boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of your local device with the massive computing power, memory, and network connectivity of our cloud.

Amazon Silk

Book Publishers Should Be Wary of Amazon’s Subscription Plans

What if a $79/year subscription to Amazon Prime didn’t just buy you faster shipping for hardcovers and small appliances, and free streaming for old movies and TV shows? What if it also let you read entire books from a similarly curated back catalog?

Several executives speaking anonymously to the Wall Street Journal report that Amazon has approached book publishers about doing exactly that.

Amazon has told publishers it is considering creating a digital-book library featuring older titles… Amazon would offer book publishers a substantial fee for participating in the program, people familiar with the proposal said. Some of these people said that Amazon would limit the amount of books that Amazon Prime customers could read for free every month.

Before Prime members (disclosure: that’s me) start gleefully rubbing their hands together, note that the publishers haven’t signed on. In fact, their executives are deeply skeptical. (Amazon wouldn’t comment on the story, for either the Journal or Wired)
Kilde: Wired.com

Amazon mister ebok-avtale

I juli inngikk Amazon en avtale med litteraturagenten Andrew Wylie som ga netthandelsstedet eksklusiv rett til å gi digital tilgang til en rekke e-bøker. Nå er avtalen så godt som falt i fisk, skriver Wall Street Journal.

Avtalen kom opprinnelig i stand etter at Wylie ikke klarte å lande en avtale med elektroniske forleggere for hans forfatteres allerede utgitte verker. Amazon-avtalen ble sett som en fjær i hatten for nettbutikken i krigen mot de største rivalene for elektronisk publisering; Apple og bokhandlerkjeden Barnes & Noble.

Wylie har blitt tvunget til å trekke seg fra avtalen etter at forleggeren Random House bestred at Amazon kunne selge deres verker i digital form. Random House var den opprinnelige utgiveren av 13 av de 20 bøkene som så langt var blitt gjort tilgjengelig gjennom Amazon.

Kilde: DN.no

Amazon i krangel med forlagskjempe

Nettbutikken Amazon.com har fjernet flere boktitler fra Maximilian, et av de største forlagene i USA, etter krav om å sette opp prisene på forlagets bøker for lesebrettet Kindle, skriver Wall Street Journal.

Maximilian ønsker at Amazon skal sette prisene på e-bøkene høyere enn 9,99 dollar (59 kroner), som er den normale prisen for Kindle-titler i nettbutikken.

- Vi har uttrykt vår sterke uenighet, og understreker hvor seriøs den er ved å midlertidig stanse salget av alle Maximilian-titler, skriver Amazon i en melding.

E24