The Bookseller has a long feature article about the plight of independent bookstores in the UK. Their numbers have been dropping over the last few years, from 1,483 in 2006 to 1,099 in 2011. The article puts this down not only to Amazon and e-books, but also supermarket competition and the down economy in general. But even so, most of the remaining booksellers don’t seem to subscribe to the gloom and doom going around that e-books are going to kill bookstores altogether. They think they have at least a good chance of sticking around for years to come....

On FutureBook, Steve Emecz wonders why Barnes & Noble still hasn’t made the Nook devices, Nook Reader apps, or Nook e-books available outside the US and Canada. Amazon and Kobo, he points out, have readers and software available in the UK. Why not B&N? An excited author of mine downloaded the Nook PC app and bought a copy of his e-enhanced book this weekend and was hugely impressed (The London of Sherlock Holmes hyperlinking to Google Maps). I tried to do the same, and indeed also tried to download the exciting new Nook iPad app too...

The Bookseller Group has joined with other publishing organizations in the UK to formally request that the nation's Competition Commission investigate Amazon's proposed purchase of The Book Depository. The Bookseller's managing director explained that his company feels it will give Amazon too much control over the marketplace: Nigel Roby, m.d of The Bookseller Group, said: "It is not that TBD's acquisition creates a sudden, new, anti-competitive position; it is rather that it is the straw that broke the camel's back. If Amazon is in a stronger position to demand better terms from publishers, this could also have a knock-on effect for...

Ever since Rupert Murdoch's The Times erected a paywall a year ago, observers have been curious about whether it could bring in enough paying readers with such a strict no-free-content policy. This week, AdNews reported that the newspaper "now has 101,036 people signed up to its digital platforms including website, iPad and kindle wireless reading device"—a 28% increase from February's tally of 79,000. This time last year, there were reports that nobody was going past the registration page (not even print subscribers with free access), with one person guesstimating that less than 30,000 readers had subscribed to the website or the...

The US isn’t the only place where publisher e-book prices are higher than some consumers would like. While we’ve carried a number of examples where the e-book price was higher than the paper book price, most of them have focused on America. But on his blog nikf.org, Nik Fletcher rants about some British Kindle e-book price gouging. Fletcher calls back to the Metro article on piracy I mentioned here, and suggests that high pricing might be a contributing factor. He brings up the example of a Jeffrey Archer novel that is priced at £9.99 (£11.99 MSRP) for the Amazon...

The Bookseller reports that some serious discussion is going on in the UK between publishers and librarians over rules for e-book lending at libraries. Back in October we reported on the UK Publishers Association setting down restrictive ground rules to prevent library users from downloading e-books outside of library facilities—a move that would eliminate one of the biggest advantages e-books have. (It turned out that these restrictions had apparently been brought on by people from China “joining British libraries and plundering their virtual collections for free.”) At the moment, some British publishers do permit library lending (via e-book lending...

Publishing Perspectives has a brief piece about a London Book Fair seminar to be given tomorrow by Evan Schnittman, Bloomsbury’s MD, Sales and Marketing, Print and Digital. Schnittman’s position is that the publishing industry needs to move to a global publishing model rather than stay bound up in territorial restrictions. Interestingly, one of his supporting arguments does not involve e-books, but the inverse—companies that sell print books, like Amazon or the Book Depository, are cheerfully shipping print books around the world in response to Internet orders, meaning that local publishers can lose out on sales to publishers from other...

The UK’s Prospect Magazine has a piece by Leo Benedictus looking at the besieged state of libraries in the UK (with over 450 library closures planned), and wondering whether this is as terrible a thing as library supporters contend given how well e-book readers work. Benedictus suggests that some defenders of libraries might be doing so less out of a belief in libraries’ intrinsic beneficence than a moral obligation to defend endangered species, and many of the benefits of libraries can be found in e-book readers. The talk of a future in which children...

It seems that without exception, any time someone notices e-book piracy, it’s suddenly a huge problem, instead of having built over nearly twenty years during which most publishers and authors who were not Harlan Ellison did not find it worth their time to bother doing anything about. An article in the Guardian today is no exception. UK writers think that a new publicity campaign is needed to educate people on why “stealing” books is wrong. (Clearly they’ve observed the success that those obnoxious, patronizing PSAs Hollywood has tacked onto theatrical movies have had—because naturally the people who pay to see movies...

E-readers have been doing pretty well lately. The Bookseller reports that the e-reader market in the UK doubled over Christmas, showing that 7% of British adults received a new e-reader during that time, bringing the total percentage of e-reader adoption by adults to 13%. The Kindle and iPad were the fastest-growing devices, but 19% of e-book downloaders say they use iPhones to read digital content, and 13% say it is the device they use most often. Perhaps most interestingly for the UK publishing industry, 61% of the people who got e-readers for Christmas had downloaded a paid-for e-book, and...

Publishing Perspectives reports that a delegation of UK indie booksellers has returned from the American Bookseller’s Association’s Winter Institute in Washington DC with a complete attitude change toward e-books. Whereas before they had been strongly opposed to e-books, now they are beginning to see opportunities in the partnership Google Editions is forging with American indie bookstores. Jane Streeter, President of the Bookseller’s Association, notes that wholesalers could have an important part the process by providing the “back office” functions of managing the actual downloading process and helping retailers improve often-obsolete websites. When Google Editions launches in the UK, it...

I mentioned last week that the UK government had eliminated its funding for literacy charity Booktrust with the new budget that takes effect in April. In response to public outrage at this decision, The Bookseller reports that the government and Booktrust have released a joint statement saying that the government will “continue to fund Booktrust book-gifting programmes in the future.” However, critics are still skeptical. Labour leader Ed Miliband calls it only a “partial U-turn” (isn’t that kind of like being “a little bit pregnant”? A “partial U-turn” is just a turn!) and points out that the announcement is...