What is the future of publishing? Or even, of publishers? Here are a couple of articles that offer some interesting perspectives. For starters, the Vancouver Sun has an interesting piece that looks at the shifts brought about by Amazon’s Kindle and e-reader strategy, summarizing the issues facing the publishing industry at the moment. Amazon’s loss-leader strategy vs. agency pricing come in for discussion, as well as the possible effects of the DoJ antitrust lawsuit. It does seem to favor the publishing-industry side of things just a bit, though: While the lawsuit sounds like good news...

Are agents still necessary in the new e-publishing world? I’m running across a number of people who don’t seem to think so. For example, self-publishing writer Stephen Leather opined in a recent interview with The Bookseller Magazine: I think agents will be the hardest hit by the eBook revolution. There is almost no negotiation with Amazon over royalty rates so if you are dealing with them it’s pointless to pay an agent fifteen per cent. It used to be agents who acted as the gatekeepers – more trendy jargon – and they pretty much decided who...

How popular is self-published fiction becoming? Apparently popular enough to draw major Hollywood attention. Gossip site Deadline reports that the production company of Ridley (Prometheus, Bladerunner) and Tony (Top Gun) Scott is in the process of snagging the movie rights to the self-published dystopian SF novel Wool by Hugh Howey. Wool seems to be a very popular novel; the Amazon Best Sellers Rank is currently #103 on the Kindle Store paid chart (though I expect it will be well back into the top 100 by sometime tomorrow based on publicity from this story), #1 in “High Tech” science fiction...

Although E-Ink previously stated it isn’t ramping up color e-ink display production, the rumors of impending color e-ink Kindles simply will not die. Our sister blog Gadgetell reports on a story from rumor-monger Digitimes that claims Amazon is “likely” to launch a capacitive-touch-screened color e-ink Kindle in the second half of this year. Personally, I can’t see it. I don’t think that color e-ink is mature enough for Amazon to want to step up just yet. Bezos has historically been reluctant to move to any new technology before its time, and over the last couple of years has seemed...

paidContent has talked to Charlie Redmayne, the CEO of Pottermore, about the deal Amazon announced to add the Harry Potter titles to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, the program that lets Prime-subscribing Kindle owners check out one e-book per month for free. Redmayne admits that the deal may cannibalize some sales, but he believes it will drive even greater sales as readers check out the first book and decide they want to read them all right away. And Amazon is paying “a large amount of money” for the right to lend the e-books, which will also help make...

CNet’s Sharon Vaknin has a 3-minute video (embedded below) in which she covers some ways of giving e-books as gifts. While the process is pretty simple overall, it is interesting to see Vaknin present video of how it works. Giving e-books as gifts with the Kindle or Nook is as easy as clicking on “Give As Gift” on the Kindle or B&N listing for the book. Both sites offer a time-delay feature in which you can choose a calendar date to have the e-book delivered. iBooks doesn’t permit e-book gifting, however, so all you can really do is send...

Remember when Target started selling the Kindle, almost exactly two years ago? It appears that the bloom is off the rose. The Verge reports that Target is going to “[phase] out Kindles and all Amazon- and Kindle-branded products in the spring of 2012.” However, Target will continue to offer other e-readers, including Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Other blogs such as Engadget are speculating on the causes. Might it be because Target is going to open mini-Apple stores, and Apple asked Target to phase out goods from its closest competitor? But Best Buy has its own mini-Apple stores and it...

Even though the Justice Department has kiboshed “most favored nation” deals in the arrangement with the three agency publishers who settled, those deals are only binding on those publishers. Amazon is still using it in its arrangements with smaller publishers, and will probably continue to do so until and unless the DoJ turns its gimlet eye on them. The New York Times and PaidContent, among others, are reporting on the case of Buzz Bissinger’s 12,000-word essay “After Friday Night Lights,” a sort of afterword to his book Friday Night Lights whose normal list price is $2.99. However, this...

Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin’s latest column is a look at the motives behind Amazon’s competitive behavior, and how it might end legacy publishing. Perhaps the most interesting thing here is that Shatzkin spends the first half of the post giving the devil his due, explaining why Amazon has been looking so good to so many people with manuscripts they want to get out there. If you’ve got the manuscript in hand and you have a choice between [spending months to go from manuscript to published book and earning lower royalties] and having books to show your...

I saw a note on BoingBoing that Rick Munarriz’s 9-page essay “Why the Kindle Will Fail” is now available to Amazon Prime subscribers to read for free as part of Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library program. This seems pretty funny at first glance: ha ha, everybody laugh at the silly prognosticator. Except when you look a little closer into it, it’s really not all that ironic at all. I’m not a Prime subscriber, and I’m not about to shell out $2.99 to buy the e-book. (In fact, that he’s charging $2.99 for a 9-page essay that’s too short even...

One of the things heralded by the Department of Justice settlement is that it might allow book/e-book sellers to experiment with new ways of selling or packaging their products. Jane Litte at Dear Author writes about three possible experimental models she would like to see bookstores and publishers try out. One model is adding different types of subscription offerings, like Audible.com’s monthly audiobook memberships. If publishers with extensive backlists offered subscription pricing for older books, it could lead to selling more of their new books. She also proposes selling “best of” bundles, in which part or all of a...

Everyone is paying attention to the e-book pricing fight against Amazon right now, but Bloomberg Businessweek reports there’s another disagreement going on between Amazon and the publishers behind the scenes that nobody has really noticed: the question of print on demand. Amazon already offers its own print on demand services, used for mainly for small independent or self-publishing, and the technology has gotten a lot better over the fifteen years since it was introduced—print-on-demand titles are by now largely indistinguishable from large-print-run paperbacks. The rub is that Amazon would like to expand its print-on-demand operations so that it can print copies of...