Publishing Perspectives reports that French readers seem to think that brick and mortar bookstores are more expensive than on-line purchasing "when, in reality, book prices are supposed to be the same across all channels.” (Is that true in France? It definitely is not in the USA, but I seem to recall hearing somewhere about European regulation of pricing.)

Ars Technica reports that at a conference on Tuesday, Apple COO Tim Cook said that, since the majority of Apple’s revenue now comes from the iPhone family of devices, Apple now considers itself a “mobile device business” and the iPad will be a natural extension of that business.

A cautionary tale from Jim Macdonald at Making Light: vanity press PublishAmerica is now offering to submit five copies of its authors’ books to Random House’s acquisitions editors—provided the authors order at least 10 copies of that book themself at half-price.

What PublishAmerica isn’t trying very hard to make clear is that there is no guarantee Random House will actually look at those books (indeed, they’ll probably circular-file them the same way they would any unsolicited manuscript)—but as Macdonald says, PublishAmerica doesn’t really care because they already got paid for those ten books.

There’s a difference between self-publishing houses and vanity presses, and that difference should be pretty obvious by now.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Yes, some countries (France among them) have fixed book price agreements, some by law (like France) some by business agreement (like the Netherlands).

    Empirically, countries that previously had such agreements but repealed them (like the UK) tend to see large chain stores displacing independent bookstores (a process that should be quite familiar to anybody in North America) and a decrease in bestseller prices, often offset by a general price increase on everything else (got to pay for all those heavily-discounted bestseller loss leaders somehow).

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