Tag Archives: Amazon

Book Covers, Book Talk, On the Web

Judge A Book By It’s Cover

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Here’s a neat little time killer. JudgeBy.com displays cover images from Amazon and you have to guess what their 5-star rating is. I played for 20 covers and never got one right. I think it’d be more fun to play with just fiction covers or some sub-set, because once you get to a cover like

Words Their Way

You really just can’t tell if all of the home schooling folks’ reviews were good or bad about this book. In reality, there isn’t much of a relation between “best-seller” and “good cover design”. You just have to look at the Best Sellers Lists in all the papers to see that, which is a shame. But this is a fun little time water built on the Amazon API though. Can you pick a best-seller simply by looking at the cover?

Book Talk, On the Web

What has changed?

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This political season, Amazon is tracking all of the “red books” and “blue books” sold. It’s been fun watching the trends as they move through the country, but I’m having a tough time making sense of any of it. Usually, all the traditionally more liberal states are buying the “blue books, while the more traditionally conservative states are buying the “red books”. Here is a May-June snapshot that Amazon posted:

Continue reading What has changed? →

Book Talk, Bookstores, News, Publishers

Amazon, again

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Wow, if there is any truth to this tid-bit Amazon is getting good at throwing their weight around. On the heels, of the P.O.D. smack-down, publishers in the U.K. now fear an Amazonian backlash over pricing structures.

Basically, the gist is Amazon prices all they offer at a big discount. Some publishers, in order to lure a few customers are offering deeper discounts on their own websites, undercutting Amazon. Evidently, this has upset the Amazon gods and they are sniffing around looking for a fix. Due to some legal-ese in the U.K. contracts, some fear

Amazon may retaliate by regarding a publisher’s online price as the recommended retail price and applying its trading terms to that.

So, if you publish a book and mark it $10, Amazon’s price is $8 at 20% off. Then, you, as the publisher and owner of the book, offer it at $7, on your own site. Amazon says “your offer of $7 is the ‘real market’ value since that’s what you, as the publisher, are offering” so we’ll now sell your book for $5.60 per our 20% off agreement”.

You know, I can appreciate the chance of lower book prices as much as the next starving book hoarder… but there is just something about a retailer having the clout to tell publishers and content developers what they can and cannot do with their products, that gets my all kinds of ticked off. I hope it never happens.
{via Bookninja}

Book Talk, News

Lightning strikes Amazon

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Let’s hear it for compeititon! Amazon has been forced to spell out exactly what their new POD policies allow and ban. In response to a letter from competitor Lightning Source‘s John Ingram, Amazon has conceded that there are still ways to sell your POD books on site without using their Booksurge program…

Amazon further notes that if publishers do not want to use BookSurge for pod, they can still sell their titles through the e-tailer as part of it Advantage Program, provided they pre-produce five copies of each title that Amazon will stock in its warehouse. Publishers can also use Amazon’s third party marketplace option to list titles. Amazon is not requiring that pod titles be printed exclusively through BookSurge.

So basically, you can pay Amazon the extra fee through Booksurge to have your POD book sold on site or you can by Amazon the extra fee through the Advantage program or merchant marketplace program and have your book sold on site.

So either way Amazon is going to get you to pay for not using their POD service. But at least today they had to own up to their plans.

{via Publisher’s Weekly}