How to Use Technology to Get Through Your Reading List (Lifehacker)
The internet is full of brilliant articles you haven’t read. So is your read-it-later app of choice, whether it’s Pocket, Readability, Instapaper or any other. Here’s how to finally tackle that reading list, with a little help from technology.
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Agency eBook Pricing Will be Alive and Well in Canada Until at Least May 2015 (The Digital Reader)
The major US trade publishers may have relinquished control of their ebook prices here in the US and in Europe but Canada, well, that is a different story.
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5 Tips For Getting Out of a Long-Term Reading Slump (Book Riot)
When you haven’t been reading for awhile, it can be hard to get back into the habit of reading. Where do you even start?
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The Content Flood and Authors Whining (Digital Book World)
Sales are down for most authors. You don’t see blog posts about it or tweets, but it’s a reality. And the reason is simple: there’s more content out there than ever before.
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Kindle Daily Deal: Blur (and others)
The only reason the current administration’s DOJ has gone after agency pricing for ebooks is that Amazon is one of its favored businesses.
The essence of Chicago machine politics is pay-to-play. Pay the proper politicians and you’ll not only face no troubles from government (i.e. for dominating a market), its agencies will happily go after your competitors. That’s Chicago and that’s Obama and his AG, Eric Holder. They’re both Chicago politicians. Heck, that’s so obvious, you’d think even the NY Times could figure it out.
Evils like that are often exposed by their inconsistencies. At the same time that agency pricing is allegedly evil for ebooks, it’s being used across the industry, including by Amazon, to sell apps, movies, and music.
It is also exposed by events. The Seattle law firm that supposedly put the DOJ on Apple and the major publishers is quite literally located in Seattle’s South Lake Union only a few blocks from Amazon’s global headquarters.
Suspicious? Of course it is. If we had a Republican in the White House, every network would have sent a reporter to walk breathlessly and excitedly, out of the law firm’s front office, across Dexter, and as close as Amazon security would let them get to Jeff Bezos’s office. It wouldn’t be a long walk.
The key difference lies in the freedom that agency pricing gives me as an author. I can force Amazon not to sell my ebooks below cost in an all too obvious effort to destroy my competitors and leave me with only one significant ebook retailer whose demands I will have to obey. That I have sense enough to impose, although that good sense seems lacking in all too many authors.
And if what I fear happens, an Amazon whose ebook royalties are among the worst in retailing, will pay even less.
What does Amazon really want to pay authors? Leaks that came out yesterday claim that its crowd-source publishing scheme will pay authors 50% of retail for ebooks. That’s 50% of retail for an author who has apparently signed a contract giving Amazon a five-year exclusive.
You can imagine what authors who dare to publish elsewhere will get. Perhaps it will be 40%, but it’s more likely to be the 35% that Amazon currently pays for ebooks priced outside $2.99-9.99.
For the record, Apple pays 70% at all retail prices and B&N pays 65% over a wider price range that Amazon. Long term, I wouldn’t be surprised if an Amazon success means that most authors will only make half as much per sale as they now make.
And yet Amazon still has fanboys among authors. That’s what amazes me.
@Michael, the article about agency pricing was referring to Canada. I’m not sure how President Obama’s policies are or are not relevant to Canada.