Another large publisher has decided that ebook subscription services are worth testing out: Macmillan on Tuesday became the third big-5 publisher to make ebooks available on Oyster and Scribd, following HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster.

Macmillan is adding about 1,000 titles to both services. Macmillan CEO John Sargent had said in December that the publisher would test ebook subscriptions on “backlist books, and mostly with titles that are not well represented at bricks and mortar retail stores,” as a way of battling Amazon’s dominance in the ebook market.

Oyster and Scribd are vying for dominance in the ebook subscription market right now, alongside [company]Amazon[/company], which launched its competing Kindle Unlimited service over the summer. All three services are slightly less than $10 a month. So far, big-5 publishers are refusing to participate in Kindle Unlimited (like Macmillan, they see no reason to give Amazon a larger share of their ebook sales than…

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Readers Owe Writers Nothing

12 January 2015 by particularkev

The link below is to an article that considers what readers owe writers – nothing!

For more visit:
http://litreactor.com/columns/readers-do-not-owe-writers-anything

Fifth Dimension Books

11 January 2015 by particularkev

The link below is to an article that takes a look at an innovative book store on wheels in the USA.

For more visit:
http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/blog/creative/2015/01/austin-couple-takes-book-business-into-a-new.html

Kids and Reading

10 January 2015 by particularkev

The links below are to articles that takes a look at kids and their reading habits.

For more visit:
– http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/what-makes-kids-read
– http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2015/ebooks-finding-their-place-among-young-readers/

Kindle Unlimited and the ongoing commoditization of books

8 January 2015 by particularkev

Gigaom

If you know anyone who writes books, or if you follow any authors on social media, you’re probably used to regular cries of doom and gloom about the death of writing and how Amazon is killing the book as we know it. Some of this may even be true. But if anything, it’s the massive increase in writing of all kinds that is killing (or changing) the book industry, and Amazon is just one part of that phenomenon. Books — like so many other forms of media — are becoming a commodity.

Take Kindle Unlimited, for example, an Amazon feature that provides a kind of Spotify-for-books rental service, where users pay $9.99 per month and can borrow one of more than 700,000 books. The service is similar to subscription rentals offered by Oyster and Scribd, but since this is Amazon, all hell broke loose when the new offering was…

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