Being able to trust a book review on popular sites such as Amazon and Goodreads is getting difficult. These sites have fake reviews—some good and some bad—designed to work the system by raising and droping books in the rankings. Amy Holman Edelman and those at IndieReader are looking to help readers with this problem. They recently created a Kickstarter campaing to raise funds for Rabble Reads, a website with aggregated book reviews for both traditionally published and self-published books. (Think Rotten Tomatoes for readers.) [caption id="attachment_80523" align="alignright" width="176"] Amy Holman Edelman[/caption] “This site will help people to zero in and what’s good and what’s not,” says Holman Edelman, of Montclair, N.J....

O wonder! How many goodly books are there here! How beauteous publishing is! I attended the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) conference this past Tuesday and learned about a topic that captivates me: new forms that books are able to take when they are conceived as e-books. There is so much creative work being done in this area that I often want to hold it up to show those who think we are an industry in turmoil. An industry in transition, yes, but with many bright minds at work moving us in exciting new directions. Here’s a quick look at some highlights: Fabienne...

  Numbers show that the publishing industry is handling the rise of e-readers better than what folk knowledge might suggest. The fall publishing season is in full swing. There can hardly have been a year with more luminaries atop both the fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists; J. K. Rowling, Michael Chabon, Ken Follett, Junot Diaz, among others, represent literary acclaim and commercial appeal. Diaz (This Is How You Lose Her) is having an especially good run: He is both a National Book Award finalist and a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" prize. Stephen Colbert, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Young, Bob Woodward, and Salman Rushdie...

Do I really have to say anything else?  I have dropped my ebook prices, across the board, to 99¢ ($0.99US). Well, except for the free books.  They're still free. Okay, maybe I need to say a bit more about this.  As in: Why did I do it? The short answer is, I did it because my book sales have been in a slump for the past few months.  I could, of course, speculate on all sorts of arcane market forces, bad breaks, genre popularity slips and pirate conspiracies to account for that, but I'm pretty sure the...

In the wake of the Amazon/Macmillan e-book pricing affair and the reader comments it stirred up, Charlie Stross has decided to tackle some common misconceptions about the publishing industry on his blog. He has made two posts so far. The first misconception Stross covers is simply that “the publishing industry makes sense.” He notes that a lot of discussions about “the publishing industry” treat it as a more or less uniform entity where every part works about the same as every other part. He goes on to explain that this is not quite true. For the rest...

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post on O’Reilly’s Tools of Change website that I wanted to cover, but it was so long that I never actually got around to looking at it in the detail I needed, until now. Fortunately, the article is still no less timely. This piece is an interview with Richard Nash, a theater-director-turned-publisher who has now launched a “social publishing” start-up called Cursor. Nash talks about Cursor and its goals, then goes on to discuss some of the broader implications of publishing meeting the kind of “Web 2.0” interactivity that is...

Self-publishing has gotten easier and easier lately, with the arrival of print-on-demand services such as Lulu and on-line stores such as Amazon offering their own packages. But until now, the potential self-publishing author has been handicapped by one critical factor: he actually has to write the book (or arrange a ghost-writer) himself. But now VentureBeat reports on a self-publishing site called FastPencil that is offering a “Thought Leadership” program. FastPencil will provide business leaders and CEOs with a ghost-writing team that can translate their ideas into a book which they will then distribute as print and e-books through...

Switzerland is looking at reinstating its fixed book price law. This law, like those in France, Germany and Italy, restricts the sale of books below the publisher's recommended price. The rationale is to support independent booksellers, small publishers and chains that have to compete with Amazon. There is currently some dispute as to whether the new law should apply to online book retailers. More info here....

The New York Times has an article covering the implications of the impending agency pricing model for book sales. It mentions the one-star ratings that have shown up when e-book editions have been delayed or perceived as too expensive, and warns that publishers may be in for more than they bargain for with the increase in price. Many of the arguments that we have covered in detail over the last couple of weeks make their appearance here: the cost of printing and shipping a paper book versus price of e-book, the sense of “entitlement” displayed by consumers, and the...

Rupert Murdoch has been in the news lately for his strong stance against content aggregators such as Google News. Interestingly, it seems his daughter Elisabeth does not share his views on content “theft”. In a speech to the NATPE national TV conference, Elisabeth Murdoch recently stated that some piracy may be inevitable. "Fans remain the best salesmen of our content, even if that behavior is on the borderline of piracy. Danger of the new world is that we must concede that we'll lose some control." Murdoch said that social networking might be...

I don’t know how I could have missed this. Cyberbooks by Ben Bova, one of the seminal fictional depictions of e-books, finally became available as an e-book itself last year—and best of all, it’s a Baen e-book which means no DRM and a wide variety of formats. Cyberbooks was published as part of the Ben Bova anthology Laugh Lines, available in the November 2009 Webscriptions month for $15, or by itself for $6. The book is a brilliant, scathing satire of the publishing industry (in fact, I’m a bit surprised that the original publisher had enough of...

We had a great show today on The Biblio File, marred only by a minor technical malfunction in the middle. I was joined by Paula Berinstein of The Writing Show (as well as a number of listeners in the text chat) and we talked for over an hour about Ficbot’s and my posts, the Amazon/Macmillan situation in general, and related matters. The 30-megabyte mp3 file can be downloaded here (right-click and choose “save as”), or streamed from the show’s homepage. At some point it will be available in the  iTunes podcast section as well. Items we...