Category Archives: News

Book Talk, Bookstores, Digital Publishing, E-Books, News, On the Web, Publishers, Publishing Industry News, Technology

Amazon Ready to Battle for Books

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It’s less than a week before Steve Jobs takes the stage atop a unicorn showing the world the fabled Apple Tablet (iSlate). And it appears that Amazon thinks there is going to be a real battle for books. In the past two years, Amazon has used its size to bulldoze its way through publishing. But all that is changing, fast.

1. New 70% royalty rate. Amazon has been artificially keeping Kindle book prices at $9.99, to entice readers. Fancy math aside, this just means that Amazon has to pay royalties based on the cover price, not the lower $9.99 price. So the profit is non-existent there. This week Amazon announced, that starting in June, they will increase their payouts to 70%. This should balance out a lot of the math so that publishers can keep the doors open and Amazon can keep the prices low.

2. Kindle to support apps. Amazon is making the Kindle SDK available for download and will open up the devices as app platforms. So, if all things stay constant, third-party folks could make software that readers could install and run, in their Kindle. This is the same model used on the iPhone and other smart phones.

3. Amazon invites other printers back to the party. It’s no secret people can print their own books these days. The secret is finding a great way to sell and distribute those books. For years Amazon let people print their own books and then sell them on Amazon as each being their own publisher. In 2009, Amazon stopped playing nice and told writers that if you want to print your own writings to sell on our site, you have to use our printers… at our prices… everyone else, hit the road. This was a BIG deal and lots of people left the Amazon ecosystem. But now they have backed down and opened the doors to everyone again.

And all of this because the latest twist on the rumor of the hearsay of the tablet is that Apple has been talking to publishers to build enhanced editions of their eBooks to run on the pixi-dust powered Apple Tablet. I just want to know how “enhanced” an eBook has to be to warrant a $1,000 device, multi-functional or not? We’ll see.

What I do know is that consumers win again as competition forces big businesses to be more open and agile.

Birmingham, Book Talk, Bookstores, Events, library, News

Birmingham’s Local Author Expo This Weekend

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The annual Local Author Expo has been in full swing since 11 a.m. today and ends at 3 p.m. for the day. If you didn’t make it out today, you can go by the Birmingham Library tomorrow (Sat., Dec. 5th) and mingle with some of Birmingham’s literary minds.

Over 140 local authors are attending this year to sell, sign books and meet readers. I haven’t been by today, but I did go last year and posted some photos of the author tables winding around the corridors of the library’s first level.

One thing you are guaranteed, if you you make it by the Author Expo… lots of interesting people talking about interesting local topics.

Birmingham, Bookstores, News, On the Web

Making Changes to the Site

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Exciting things are happening over at LibraryThing and they tie in locally. So I am making a few changes to help bolster their efforts and build buzz for local Birmingham bookstores. This first change, really will affects the handful of visitors that have subscribed to the {head}:sub/head Google Calendar. I have decided to stop updating that calendar.

Three years ago, when I started it Google Calendar was a great way for people to subscribe to events that I posted, but now LibraryThing has a fetaure that they call LibraryThing Local. It’s relaly cool and gets cooler every month. So instead of keeping up with author events and book signings in Google Calendar, I will be maintaing the information over on LibraryThing and displaying the RSS feed from the events, in my sidebar. So you will be able to subscribe to the Birmingham Book Events RSS feed instead.

So if you have been using the Google Calendar, thanks! It’s been fun. But not as fun as the next few months are going to be. If you know of any local book-related events in and around Birmingham, please pass it along or enter it into LibraryThing.