Disrupting the Faculty: The Changing Face of the College Textbook Business (Scholarly Kitchen)
Of all segments of publishing, the college textbook business has seemed for some time now to be the most likely to be disrupted. There are many reasons for this, but the principal one is the spiraling cost of many texts, which has elicited a strong and angry reaction, including legislative action and the creation of rival materials that draw on many of the precepts of the Open Access movement (usually called OER for open educational resources).
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Ebooks, Nook and Barnes & Noble (An American Editor)
Long-time readers of An American Editor are probably wondering whatever happened to the articles about ebooks. The answer really is that nothing much has been happening in ebookworld. The novelty of ebooks has worn off and there really hasn’t been such great movement in hardware as to warrant regular posts. In addition, all the problems previously noted about self-published ebooks remain.
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How Booktrope Turned a Free eBook Into a Bestseller (Digital Book World)
Riversong, a women’s fiction title by first-time author Tess Thomspon, is a bona fide bestseller for publisher BookTrope, having sold about 90,000 copies to date. The book reached #1 on Nook and spent 35 days in Amazon’s Top 100 in 2012. Booktrope attributes the fast rise of this book to hard work, an aggressive social media and marketing campaign, and a strategy that includes free ebook giveaways.
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Digital-Pnly Imprints in the eBook Era: Inclusive or Exploitative?
Poor old big-name publishers. Stick to your guns by insisting on the value of your traditional, print-centric gatekeeping, and you’ll be shunted straight to the top of the endangered species list. Pander to the plebs by putting a fancy cover on fan fiction, and you’ll be decried as an opportunist whore who has swapped literary values for trending hashtags.
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Kindle Daily Deals: “Dixie Divas” by Virginia Brown (and 3 others)
