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,...

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...

In my email this morning, I received a notice from Quora that I had been invited to submit an answer for the following question: Are there any services or business models in which one can trade paperback or hardcover books for digital books, without having to pay full price again? After typing my answer, I thought it was interesting enough to repost here: Not that I've ever heard of—or no model that is legitimate under copyright law, anyway. The idea has been suggested by a number of people as something that publishers should...

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...

Barnes & Noble has announced it will not be carrying Amazon-published titles in its stores. B&N chief merchandising officer Jaime Carey issued a statement saying that the company was taking a stand against “Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity”, and that B&N didn’t get many requests for Amazon titles anyway. So, Carey said, if B&N customers want Amazon titles, they’ll just have to order them online at bn.com. Um, what? Look, guys, if you’re going to take a principled stand, go all the way. Decline to carry the titles on your web store too. I’m sure there are plenty...

On Open Salon, blogger jlsalthre posts a wry list of 25 things she learned from opening a bookstore. While most of them are observations about what kinds of people buy what kinds of print books, there are a few that show a rather pointed awareness of the electronic medium and the effects it is having: 1.  People are getting rid of bookshelves.  Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money.  Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs. 2.  While you're drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half. ...

A couple of more people have weighed in on the controversy over Amazon’s price-check app that I mentioned a couple of days ago. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has been ruffling some feathers with a column in which he first berated Amazon for its callousness in stealing business from brick-and-mortar competitors—then took Russo to task for focusing on the harm to bookstores rather than brick-and-mortar retail in general. Rather than focus on the ways that Amazon’s promotion would harm businesses whose demise might actually be a cause for alarm (like a big-box electronics store that hires...

Amazon has been running a promotion with a new smartphone-based price-checking tool that lets users scan the barcodes of items in stores and compare the prices to items Amazon sells to earn 5% store store credit per item for up to three items (excluding books). Amazon has been coming in for a bit of criticism for the promotion, given that it is trying to pull even more dollars away from brick and mortar retailers at the time of year when they make the greatest amount of sales. Author Richard Russo has a fairly long opinion piece on this in...

The Bookseller reports that Secretary Halbe Zjilstra from the Netherlands’ Department of Culture has announced there will be no fixed price for e-books in the Netherlands. The Netherlands (like much of Europe) has fixed prices on paper books, meant to secure wide availability of titles. However, e-books still have less than 1% of market share in the Netherlands. A study commissioned by the Netherlands government determined that even though the rise of e-books might harm bookstores, slapping a fixed price on them will not help bookstores and will harm the overall e-book market by diminishing innovation. I have...

On Publishing Perspectives, Rachel Aydt has an interesting story about a bookseller who has decided to try to make use of the Internet in an unusual way to sell more books. Roxanne Coady, owner of R. J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut, has a personalized reading recommendation and subscription service called Just The Right Book.com. The service works by having prospective readers take a survey to find out their tastes in reading, and then the bookstore staff selecting a personalized recommendation. Survey takers can then subscribe to a tiered subscription system, with prices ranging from $85 per year for...