Analysts’ predictions are often not worth the electrons they’re printed on, but CNET reports Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley has said in a research note to investors that Amazon could launch an iPad-sized 9-inch Kindle Fire by the middle of the year. Such a device could increase expected Kindle Fire sales from 12.7 million to 14.9 million units this year. He based this information on his contacts with Amazon component suppliers, which does not necessarily mean it will be accurate. This is only the latest in a number of reports that have suggested a 9-inch Fire could launch sometime this year,...

Amazon has been racking up a reputation as “the enemy” in publishing circles. That has led to a sort of “with us or against us” mentality in which any formerly respected person who is seen to work with Amazon in any capacity whatsoever suddenly gets tarred with that brush. It happened with Larry Kirshbaum, the long-time publishing-industry exec and agent who Amazon tapped to run its publishing subsidiary, who Mike Shatzkin says “has gone from one of the most well-liked people in publishing to the one of the most reviled.” And PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen reports it seems...

Publishers Weekly reports that the American Booksellers Association has become the latest bookstore entity to join the boycott of books produced by Amazon’s publishing arm. Indeed, the ABA’s for-profit subsidiary, IndieCommerce, has begun removing those titles from its database. IndieCommerce director Matt Supko wrote in an email announcement that the move was in response to Amazon’s policy of “locking in e-book exclusives which other retailers are not allowed to sell.” IndieCommerce has adopted a new policy of listing only “titles that are made available to retailers for sale in all available formats”. Individual bookstores can still choose to carry...

Are Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, and Indigo making a wise move by not carrying the books from Amazon’s publishing arm, or are they cutting off their noses to spite their faces? This is the question that Mike Shatzkin addresses in his latest column. He notes that a reporter contacted him, undoubtedly expecting the same sort of attacks on the move posted by some major media outlets, and was rather surprised when Shatzkin said that, from a self-interested point of view, the decision made perfect sense. Shatzkin recapitulates the recent history between Amazon, the Big Six publishers, and...

A couple of weeks ago I blogged a post by author Will Entrekin about why he felt Amazon’s Kindle Select program (in which authors give Amazon exclusivity over their work in return for getting paid for Kindle Prime subscriber e-library checkouts) was a very good deal. Now I see another post, by Christopher Wright on Eviscerati.org, about why self-publishing authors might want to stay far away. Wright compares Kindle Select to Michael Roberts’s MP3.com independent music distribution site, which allowed independent musicians (such as Wright) to upload mp3 tracks to catch the attention of the Internet audience. ...

Remember that Amazon retail store rumor from a few days ago? Well, Good E-Reader has heard more from anonymous “Amazon sources close to the situation.” According to their sources, Amazon is going to roll out a retail store in Seattle within the next few months to test the waters and see if a chain of such stores could be profitable. “They intend on going with the small boutique route with the main emphasis on books from their growing line of Amazon Exclusives and selling their e-readers and tablets,” Good E-Reader’s Michael Kozlowski writes. As a small boutique,...

On a related note to the post about graphical e-book standards I made earlier today, TOC general manager (and sometime TeleRead contributor) Joe Wilkert has written an op-ed for Publishers Weekly decrying the fragmentation of the e-book market through platform lock-in and DRM. Wilkert suggests that EPUB could be a solution to this if Amazon could be convinced to adopt it and drop DRM. (Well, of course it could. Heck, pretty much any e-book format would work if Amazon dropped DRM, thanks to Calibre.) He reiterates the usual music-industry-based arguments for ditching DRM. Several...

How can publishers create graphical e-books without a lot of duplicated effort? That’s the question posed by Richard Stephenson on FutureBook in a post about the different approaches taken by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple for displaying fixed-layout graphical content on their e-readers: Amazon's Kindle format 8 (KF8) relies on a completely separate process to create a fixed layout e-book than Apple's version of fixed layout for titles that are design-led e-books. Both are based on XHTML, but there are important differences in how pages are laid out. With KF8, each page has to be...

Canadian bookstore chain Indigo has added its voice to Barnes & Noble and Books a Million in stating that it will not carry books published by Amazon’s publishing imprint, the Globe and Mail reports. Indigo issued the standard statement decrying Amazon’s predatory tactics and congratulating Barnes & Noble for “taking a leadership stance on the matter.” Not too surprising, especially given that Indigo was the creator of Kobo, one of the only serious e-book competitors Amazon has. The Globe and Mail article characterizes this as a “setback” for Amazon, and quotes the Wall Street Journal that this is “sending...

PaidContent reports that the US’s second-largest bookstore chain, Books a Million, is following in the footsteps of Barnes & Noble and proclaiming it will not stock Amazon-published titles in its brick-and-mortar stores. It’s not clear whether, like Barnes & Noble, they will sell the titles online. Books a Million sells a version of the Nook as its own e-reader. There’s a Books a Million store in Joplin, Missouri, and I stopped by it a few months ago. I wasn’t particularly impressed. Unlike Barnes & Noble, the store does not offer free wifi for its customers—you have to pay for...

Don’t tell my Nook, my achey breaky Nook… Billy Ray Cyrus, singer of a particularly overplayed country song and father of Miley “Hannah Montana” Cyrus, has landed a book deal with Amazon’s publishing arm for his memoirs, GalleyCat reports. Publication date is expected to be spring 2013 in both hardcover and e-book editions. The deal was brokered by Trident Media CEO Dan Strone, who also arranged the $800,000 deal for Penny Marshall’s memoirs. As that anonymous publishing insider lamented a few weeks ago, Amazon is lining up some pretty big names for its publishing arm. What with...

The Authors Guild blog has an interesting piece looking at Amazon’s growth in light of a decline in antitrust enforcement. For background, it brings up the Bloomberg Businessweek story I covered the other day, it moves on to excerpt a piece in Harpers by Barry Lynn that compares Amazon to the current state of other monopolized markets, such as the chicken-raising industry: Mr. Lynn makes the case that Amazon’s dominance isn’t just a story of an industry disrupted by online commerce and digital upheaval, it’s about the abandoning of New Deal era protections of retailers in...