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From The Guardian:

Publishers reacted with excitement over the arrival of the devices ahead of Christmas, which last year saw a huge boost to ebook sales as e-readers proved a hit as gifts.

Random House UK’s digital editor, Dan Franklin, said the low prices would “open up a whole new marketplace of impulse buyers”, while Michael Bhaskar of Profile Books said Amazon had “opened the tablet race wide open in a stroke” by its gift market pricing. Bhaskar predicted “hundreds of thousands, at least” of the Kindle Fire devices would be sold in the UK before Christmas, if it launches here.

Meanwhile Bloomsbury’s digital media director, Stephanie Duncan, foresaw the Kindle Fire prompting a big leap in e-books for illustrated titles such as cookery books and children’s picture books.

“Anything that makes the experience of reading digitally better is welcomed by publishers,” she said.

More in the article.

2 COMMENTS

  1. For book publishers, this is indeed good news. But for subscription publishers (magazines, newsletters, etc.), the Kindle Fire is just another platform to lure publishers into a bad deal, where Amazon takes your customer and make him an Amazon customer. Don’t fall for it. Subscription publishers need to keep and manage the relationship with the subscriber.

    You can still publish to the Kindle — through the browser, or with an html5 app. Just don’t publish your content through Amazon.

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