The link below is to an article that takes a look at Amazon and the book.
For more visit:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/17/7396525/amazon-kindle-design-lab-audible-hachette
The link below is to an interview with Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
For more visit:
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazons-jeff-bezos-on-profits-failure-succession-big-bets-2014-12
Book publisher Macmillan, like Simon & Schuster and Hachette before it, has signed a new contract with Amazon and will return to agency pricing on its ebooks starting in 2015. In a public letter to authors and agents, Macmillan CEO John Sargent also said Amazon’s dominance in the ebook marketplace is a problem and that the publisher will experiment with ebook subscription models as a way to diversify its revenue streams.
Macmillan’s settlement with the Department of Justice in the [company]Apple[/company] ebook pricing case required it (and the four other settling publishers) to allow retailers to offer unlimited discounts on its ebooks for two years. Now the two years are up and publishers are returning to agency pricing agreements with Amazon. Under agency pricing, the publisher sets an ebook’s price and the retailer takes a commission. The negotiations between Amazon and publisher Hachette were highly fraught and public, but Macmillan’s…
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In a new twist in the long running antitrust case against Apple, an appeals court on Monday cast doubt on the Justice Department’s theory that the company brokered an illegal conspiracy among book publishers, and asked instead why the government’s focus has not been on Amazon.
The 90-minute hearing, which took place at the Second Circuit Court in Manhattan, represented a major shift in momentum in a case that has until now gone completely against Apple. On Monday, the three appeals court judges suggested that District Judge Denise Cote might have been too quick to conclude that Apple’s pricing arrangements with five publishers violated antitrust laws.
“Would it not matter that all those people got together to defeat a monopolist? It’s like the mice that got together to put a bell on a cat,” U.S. Circuit Judge Dennis Jacobs told the Justice Department’s lawyer, Malcolm Stewart.
The cat in question here is [company]Amazon[/company], which controlled over…
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The link below is to an article that looks at the battle for fanfic between Amazon and Wattpad.
For more visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/dec/08/amazon-wattpad-fanfic-retail
“The book industry is in better shape than it ever has been and it’s due to ebooks,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told an audience on Tuesday in a wide-ranging interview that addressed the company’s drone plans, its campus culture and its indifference to pain of short-term shareholders.
Speaking at a BusinessInsider event in New York, Bezos downplayed [company]Amazon’s[/company] recent high-profile spat with publisher Hachette as a run-of-the-mill fight with a supplier, adding that it’s the essential job of any retailer to fight for the best price for its customers.
As for the publishing industry and its authors, Bezos argued that $30 is too high a price for books, and that lower prices will lead to more readers, which will in turn benefit everyone. And in a remark that may have been intended to head off antitrust arguments, he urged people to consider book prices in the context of a larger entertainment market.
“Books don’t…
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In the deal that Amazon and Hachette Book Group finally reached Thursday after months of bitter negotiations, we don’t really know which side “won,” if one side did. But one survivor — perhaps surprisingly — was agency pricing for ebooks, the practice through which the publisher sets an ebook’s price and the retailer takes a commission.
Hachette said in a letter to authors and agents Thursday:
The new agreement delivers considerable benefits. It gives us full responsibility for the consumer prices of our ebooks. This approach, known as the Agency model, protects the value of our authors’ content, while allowing the publisher to change ebook prices dynamically to maximize sales.
That wasn’t a foregone conclusion. In 2010, [company]Amazon[/company] was vehemently opposed to agency pricing, though it ultimately capitulated. Agency pricing was at the heart of the of the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Apple and book publishers in 2012, in which…
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At the BookShelf 
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