Category Archives: Amazon

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Amazon’s new high-end e-reader, the Kindle Voyage, starts at $199 but has fancy page turns

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Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

Remember all that speculation that Amazon would one day start giving away Kindle e-readers for free? In fact, the company is going in the opposite direction: Amazon introduced on Wednesday a new, high-end e-reader, the Kindle Voyage, that starts at $199 for the version with ads and goes all the way up to $289 for an ad-free, 3G version. Not only is it expensive for an e-reader, it is twice as expensive as the most basic tablet that Amazon also launched Wednesday.

So what will you get for your money? The Kindle Voyage is thinner and lighter than previous devices. It has a totally flat glass screen, without the raised plastic bezel that is present on cheaper models, and the screen is high-resolution, with 300 pixels per inch. Like the Kindle Paperwhite, the Voyage is front-lit, but its light is better — it can go “39 percent brighter” and…

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Everything Book Lovers Need to Know About Amazon vs. Hachette

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Kindle Unlimited: The Key Questions

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How The Big 5 Publishers Hobbled The Amazon Unlimited Launch

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Elites or freedom fighters: How the Amazon-Hachette battle took on the rhetoric of class warfare

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Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

One side defends the ideals that this nation was founded on: Independence and freedom from tyranny. The other side is made up of elites who keep the little people down and take the money that is rightfully theirs in an attempt to control the message and maintain the status quo.

I’m talking not about the Tea Party and big government, but the worlds of self-publishing and traditional publishing. Yet the rhetoric in both debates often sounds very much the same. In 2009, the Tea Party movement took shape in the United States. At just around the same time, ebooks began gaining in popularity, and as the digital publishing revolution took off, so did the once-stigmatized practice of self-publishing. Authors were suddenly able to get their ebooks to large audiences without going through traditional publishers. On January 20, 2010, Amazon (s amzn) began offering 70 percent royalties on self-published Kindle books (priced between $2.99…

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Amazon Isn’t Killing Writing, The Market Is

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Amazon makes a direct offer to Hachette authors: Here’s the full letter

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Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

As the negotiations with Hachette drag on, Amazon says it is “thinking of proposing” a path that would alleviate pressure on Hachette authors.

David Naggar, VP of Kindle content and independent publishing, sent a letter to a few Hachette authors, literary agents and Authors Guild president Roxana Robinson over the weekend suggesting that “for as long as this dispute lasts, Hachette authors would get 100% of the sales price of every Hachette ebook we sell. Both Amazon and Hachette would forego all revenue and profit from the sale of every ebook until an agreement is reached.” The idea, seemingly, is that that loss of ebook revenue would “motivate both Hachette and Amazon to work faster to resolve the situation.”

Hachette would need to agree to the proposal, of course, and the letter made it clear that as of its writing Amazon hadn’t actually suggested the idea to Hachette yet: Rather…

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Ebook Pricing Court Battles

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The link below is to an article reporting on the latest legal battles concerning ebook pricing.

For more visit:
http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/big-five-back-in-court-over-ebook-pricing

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Amazon exec on Hachette dispute: “It’s all about ebook pricing”

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Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

As Amazon(s AMZN) and Hachette’s contract dispute wears on, Amazon has had little to say publicly about it: The company released an unattributed statement on the Kindle forums at the end of May, but until now no executive from the company had commented. That changed Tuesday, when Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s VP of Kindle content, gave a few quotes to the Wall Street Journal.

Amazon has been criticized for tactics like turning off pre-orders on upcoming Hachette titles. Grandinetti told the WSJ that Amazon is working “in the long-term interest of our customers.” He also seemingly confirmed reports that Amazon is demanding a larger commission on ebook sales, up from the 30 percent it currently receives: “This discussion is all about ebook pricing. The terms under which we trade will determine how good the prices are that we can offer consumers.” Grandinetti seems to be arguing that if Amazon…

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If you love books then you should be rooting for Amazon, not Hachette or the Big Five

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Mathew Ingram's avatarGigaom

As Amazon (s amzn) continues to tighten the screws on book publishers like Hachette — by making its books difficult to find, impossible to pre-order, and so on — the conventional wisdom seems to be that the company is an aggressive and possibly illegal monopoly aimed at killing publishers, and that its behavior is also bad for authors and probably consumers as well. The only problem with this view is that most of it, if not all of it, is completely wrong. What Amazon is doing is not only good for book-loving consumers but arguably good for authors as well — and even for some publishers (although not Hachette and its ilk).

Is Amazon a true monopoly? Not in any meaningful sense of the word — not any more than Walmart has a monopoly on sales of toothpaste. Yes, the electronic retailer has a large share of the ebook…

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