A couple of weeks ago I blogged a post by author Will Entrekin about why he felt Amazon’s Kindle Select program (in which authors give Amazon exclusivity over their work in return for getting paid for Kindle Prime subscriber e-library checkouts) was a very good deal. Now I see another post, by Christopher Wright on Eviscerati.org, about why self-publishing authors might want to stay far away. Wright compares Kindle Select to Michael Roberts’s MP3.com independent music distribution site, which allowed independent musicians (such as Wright) to upload mp3 tracks to catch the attention of the Internet audience. ...

Last week’s issue of Bloomberg’s Businessweek included an article titled Amazon’s Hitman. If you haven’t read it, you should. It is enlightening. The gist of the article is that Amazon is gearing up to challenge the publishing world on its own turf: the signing of and creation of big-name authors who sell hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of books. And this assault worries the Big 6 publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Random House, and Harper-Collins – with good reason: Amazon has more market value and disposable cash than they do combined. The article discusses the history of the relationship between...

From The Bookseller: Self-published crime writer Kerry Wilkinson claimed the top spot in the UK Kindle bestseller chart for the last quarter of 2011, Amazon has revealed, as speculation mounts that the online retailer is planning to open its own physical store to push its exclusive book sales. Wilkinson, from Lancashire, published his novel Locked In, one of a series featuring detective Jessica Daniel, using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing tool, and sold “hundred of thousands of copies” of it in the three months before Christmas, according to Amazon. The e-book is currently selling for 98p and...

Some folks have asked me how I came to the idea of algorithmic culture, the subject of my next book as well as many of my blog posts of late.  I usually respond by pointing them in the direction of chapter three of The Late Age of Print, which focuses on Amazon.com, product coding, and the rise digital communications in business. It occurs to me, though, that Amazon wasn’t exactly what inspired me to begin writing about algorithms, computational processes, and the broader application of principles of scientific reason to the book world.  My real inspiration came from someone you’ve probably...

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,...

On a related note to the post about graphical e-book standards I made earlier today, TOC general manager (and sometime TeleRead contributor) Joe Wilkert has written an op-ed for Publishers Weekly decrying the fragmentation of the e-book market through platform lock-in and DRM. Wilkert suggests that EPUB could be a solution to this if Amazon could be convinced to adopt it and drop DRM. (Well, of course it could. Heck, pretty much any e-book format would work if Amazon dropped DRM, thanks to Calibre.) He reiterates the usual music-industry-based arguments for ditching DRM. Several...

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...

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...

From the blurb: A blockbuster box set of five thrilling novels from five best-selling writers, for less than the price of a single Patterson, King, or Grisham novel.ULTIMATE THRILLER BOX SET5 irresistible set-ups: A crime novelist imprisoned in a desert cabin by a villain more sinister than any he has ever written... A detective's race against the clock to find a missing teenager...Twin brothers caught up in a deadly game to settle sins of the past...A lowly security guard struggling to realize his private eye fantasies... The US government conducting secret testing on the most heinous and intriguing of...

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...

From The Bookseller: Amazon.co.uk increased Kindle e-book sales by five times in its fourth quarter but its parent company Amazon.com announced a sharp fall in profits as it failed to meet analysts' expectations in its financial results today. Meanwhile the company has had a setback in the US, with Barnes & Noble saying they will not stock physical books published by Amazon.com. ... In the UK, Amazon said sales of Kindle e-books in the last three months had increased five-fold in comparison to the same period in 2010 and it received twice as many orders for Kindle...