Here’s another article from an exec of a Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) publisher about “disintermediating Amazon,” this one on Publishers Weekly. John Oakes of OR Books puts Amazon’s success in an interesting perspective when he points out that, when you get right down to it, the main advantage Amazon really has is “a comfortingly familiar Web site” that didn’t even exist at all just a few years ago. What is it selling? Its ability to sell. What if publishers were to sell e-books and print books direct, straight to consumers—and consumers were to get used to the idea...

On FutureBook, blogger “Agent Orange” discusses the way manuscript consideration times have ballooned in recent years. Where it used to be a known standard that editors should take only one month to decide whether to offer or reject, now manuscripts can be held for a year or more without the authors hearing anything about them. While this might have flown in days before the Internet, now authors have social media and can communicate their anger with their publishers to other authors who might then be inclined not to do business with that publisher. And that’s not the worst of...

Ars Technica reports that Apple has made a 31-page filing (PDF) regarding the Department of Justice’s antitrust proceedings against it and publishers Macmillan and Penguin, the only two of the “agency five” not to settle. Apple’s filing is about what we might have expected from the corporation—it insists that Amazon was the monopolist, Apple negotiated the agreements with publishers separately and individually, and furthermore that agency pricing has not harmed consumers. Apple also insists that it didn’t have anything to do with Amazon’s decision to adopt agency pricing: "Apple is not privy to Amazon’s motivations when it adopted the...

Publishers Lunch reports that the three month standoff between Amazon and the Independent Publishers Group is over. Although IPG President Mark Suchomel declined to discuss the terms of the agreement Amazon and the IPG have reached, the fact that it took three months to reach it does suggest Amazon didn’t get everything its own way—but neither did the IPG. The Publishers Lunch piece suggests that the dispute came down to the larger chunk of co-op fees Amazon wanted that also made several Big Six publishers balk. IPG ceo Curt Matthews has written about the issues...

Publishing Perspectives has another of those guest-column-cum-self-promotional pieces it runs every so often, this one from Jonas Lennermo, creative director of Publit—the company who provides the e-commerce solution used by Harlequin Scandinavia, as well as several large and 200 small publishers in Scandinavia. Lennermo discusses the benefits of publishers selling their books D2C (Direct To Consumer), bringing up O’Reilly and McSweeney’s as examples. (But not Baen, for some reason. Everyone always seems to forget about Baen.) But while O’Reilly and McSweeney’s are publishers who know how to do D2C with smashing success, they also use proprietary, self-developed systems that...

Gizmodo has a list of “10 gadgets you’d be a fool to buy right now” (that it reprinted from Laptop Mag but thankfully de-slideshow-ified)—devices that are soon to be replaced by something better. Weirdly enough, you can read e-books on all but one of them—including, naturally, e-readers. (Amazon is expected to launch new e-readers within just a few months.) The others include iPhones, Sprint phones, Windows phones, and Blackberries, as well as Windows and Android tablets. Ultrabooks and Macbook Pros are also due for refreshes, and smart TVs—the one device that doesn’t read e-books—aren’t a smart purchase with upcoming...

Publishing-industry consultant Mike Shatzkin has posted the letter he has sent the Department of Justice in regard to its proposed settlement with three of the five original Agency publishers. Shatzkin spends much of the letter establishing his credibility as a consultant, then points out the two fundamental problems he sees with the settlement. First is the one that he mentioned in his column the other day—if publishers sell directly to the consumer, they can’t sell at full price without Amazon eating their lunch, and if they discount Amazon may insist its own prices should be based on the publishers’ discount price...

OnlineUniversities.com has a post by Justin Marquis Ph.D. looking at the alarming trend of declining reading rates over the last few decades, and bringing up the recent Pew study showing that e-reader owners read more as a possible harbinger of ways to reduce the trend. People who read more, Marquis points out, become more “interesting, engaged, and intellectual”. They have a higher degree of emotional as well as standard literacy, developing empathy through repeatedly putting themselves in the place of the characters they read about. Adolescents who don’t develop good reading habits are at a disadvantage in college where...

A few days ago I mentioned the Harvard Book Store, which features an Espresso Book Machine which it uses to help it stay relevant in its market, and pondered why it is that more stores aren’t following its example. As it turns out, Alan Beatts has a definitive answer to that on the blog of his San Francisco bookstore Borderlands Books. Beatts ran the numbers for the cost of the machine, materials, and operations, versus how long it would take to pay down those costs at various rates. He determined that if he averaged one book an hour over...

How can publishers thrive in a digitally-disrupted world? David Borgenicht, president and publisher of Quirk Books (best known for publishing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) has some advice for other publishers. The five quick tips basically boil down to creating as engaging a product as possible, and then marketing effectively in order to grow new readers. 2. We are not in Kansas anymore. We are not even in the publishing business anymore. We are in the entertainment business. This is something we've said at Quirk for years. We are competing for attention against everything people do...

Did you know you can “get rich quick” selling Kindle e-books? Well, all right, maybe not get rich, but make at least “$1,000 per month” on it? I came across a post on Methods2Earn outlining the idea. Basically, the idea is that you research Amazon’s best-seller lists to find out what people want to buy, then you write (or have someone else write) an e-article (the post suggests 5,000 to 15,000 words) on that subject and publish it cheaply for Kindle. Then get some good reviews to help sell it. It really does throw the digital age into perspective,...

On IndieReader, Terry Giuliano Long has an interesting, long post about how self-publishing’s stigma has decreased over the last few years—leaving some traditional authors feeling threatened. Long notes that a number of brick and mortar booksellers are starting to make room for self-published authors in their stores, leading to traditionally-published authors complaining about the effects this is having on their income. One author even referred to it as “literary karaoke.” This comes at a time when the rise of the e-book is threatening paper sales. Industry leaders are concerned that publishers may ditch paperback sales altogether in favor of...