Amazon.com

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 9:14am on Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Smashwords, which publishes ebooks written by "independent authors," has joined forces with Amazon's Kindle store, Smashwords announced on November 23, 2009:

""Smashwords makes it free and easy for any author or publisher, anywhere in the world, to publish and distribute an ebook," said Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords. "By providing our ebooks to the Kindle store, Kindle customers can conveniently discover, sample and purchase thousands of ebooks from Smashwords authors and publishers."

"Smashwords launched in May 2008 with a focus on self-published authors, and then in May 2009 expanded its offerings to support publishers as well. The new Smashwords distribution agreements enable free and immediate worldwide distribution for thousands of ebook authors and small publishers.

"A growing number of Smashwords authors are previously published professional authors with reverted rights who use Smashwords to bring their out-of-print books back to life as ebooks.

"Smashwords will pay authors and publishers 42.5 percent of the digital list price (set by the author) for book sales through Amazon. The rate is higher than what many ebook authors can receive on their own if they publish direct with Amazon."

For more information:
https://www.smashwords.com

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 10:57pm on Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Farhad Manjoo, who will stop at nothing to generate fear, hysteria and snappy headlines ("Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four"), argues that Jeff Bezos is Big Brother and we are all helpless against the Amazon hegemony.

Published by Slate on July 20, 2009:

"Let's give Amazon the benefit of the doubt—its explanation for why it deleted some books from customers' Kindles actually sounds halfway defensible. Last week a few Kindle owners awoke to discover that the company had reached into their devices and remotely removed copies of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Amazon explained that the books had been mistakenly published, and it gave customers a full refund. It turns out that Orwell wasn't the first author to get flushed down the Kindle's memory hole."

The full story:
http://www.slate.com/id/2223214/

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 11:02pm on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

The book industry wants Amazon to raise prices on e-books, Jack Shafer reported at Slate on July 15, 2009:

"Publishers generally sell e-books to Amazon and its competitors for the same price they sell paper books to retailers—about half the list price of the paper version. Amazon and the others insist on selling most e-books for about $9.99, which pleases the publishers when the e-book retail price is close to that of the paper edition: Currently, Amazon is selling the $14 list paperback of The Big Sleep for $10.98 and the electronic Kindle version for $9.99.

The publishers dislike the rigidity of the e-book price, however, when the hardcover lists for $27.95 and Amazon sells it at a loss for $9.99. Why? For one thing, the publishers worry that the e-book vendors are robbing them of their ability to set prices by encouraging customers to think that every book should be priced at $9.99 and that further down the line this will take a bite out of their profit margins."

The full story:
http://www.slate.com/id/2222941/

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 9:33pm on Friday, June 19th, 2009

Farhad Manjoo argues that newsprint still beats the Kindle (even though Manjoo doesn't buy newspapers anymore):

"I had high hopes for the Kindle DX, Amazon's new large-screen electronic reader.

Amazon says the device is ideal for reading newspapers. When the company unveiled the DX last month, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of the Times, called it "an important milestone in the convergence between print and digital." Sulzberger is right, I guess: After using it for a week, I can say the new Kindle is a good first attempt at melding what's great about papers with what's great about digital devices. The trouble is, it's not nearly good enough."

Manjoo adds:

"But both versions of the Kindle are missing what makes print newspapers such a perfect delivery vehicle for news: graphic design. The Kindle presents news as a list—you're given a list of sections (international, national, etc.) and, in each section, a list of headlines and a one-sentence capsule of each story. It's your job to guess, from the list, which pieces to read. This turns out to be a terrible way to navigate the news."

The full story:
http://www.slate.com/id/2220793/