Cory Doctorow has an article in Publishers Weekly (linked and discussed on BoingBoing) looking at the Amazon and Macmillan pricing dispute in economic terms. Doctorow feels that there are good points on both sides: Macmillan is right to fear Amazon’s domination of the e-book field, but Amazon’s pricing might not be as bad an idea as Macmillan thinks. Doctorow talks about price discrimination (the idea that segmenting the market maximizes profit—in this case, the publishing industry practice of releasing a more expensive book first, then a cheaper one later) and demand elasticity (the idea that lowering prices brings...

From Rita Toews: Read an E-Book Week is gearing up for the 2010 event - March 7 - 13th. An impressive list of participants includes Kobo, PocketBook E-Reader and BookGlutton. Also joining in the celebration of e-books is Smashwords, as well as Badosa.com, with a selection of e-books in Spanish, Catalan, English and French. The Wright State University Libraries of Ohio will also recognize the week. They have created a special template that librarians can download from the Read an E-Book Week website to produce lapel buttons for library staff. This year a section containing resource articles has been added to the site....

CEO John Sargent of Macmillan has posted an open letter to Macmillan authors, illustrators, and literary agents giving Macmillan’s side of the dispute with Amazon. He talks about wanting to create “a level playing field” on which all device manufacturers can compete. He provides the details of what Macmillan wants to accomplish: Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will...

More information has emerged about the Amazon/Macmillan spat I mentioned last night, in which Amazon pulled almost all Macmillan titles from its store. An update to the New York Times “Bits” blog article I originally linked adds that, according to the blogger’s colleague who spoke to someone at Macmillan: Macmillan offered Amazon the opportunity to buy Kindle editions on the same “agency” model as it will sell e-books to Apple for the iPad. Under this model, the publisher sets the consumer book price and takes 70 percent of each sale, leaving 30 percent to the...

Cory Doctorow has a brief rant on BoingBoing about Amazon’s inconsistent use of terminology between its Kindle e-book license agreement and its advertisements. The license agreement states that customers do not actually “own” Kindle books they buy; they’re simply “licensing” them for a limited set of uses. However, Doctorow points out: It's such a silly notion that even Amazon can't keep its story straight. Take this press-release in which Amazon trumpets that its "customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books." Purchased, not "licensed." Or consider this ad (courtesy of...

Over on TechCrunch, Paul Carr has posted a piece called “NSFW: Free as in ‘my publisher will disown me after I pirate my book on TechCrunch’”. (“NSFW” seems to be the column name; the content of this particular column seems to be entirely SFW, with the possible exception of the word “whore”.) Carr begins by talking about Stephen Covey and his decision to sell exclusively Kindle via Rosetta, claiming he still had the e-book rights since his 1989 contract pre-dates anyone even knowing what an e-book was. (Simon & Schuster disagrees of course.) He also mentions Cory...

Cory Doctorow’s latest book, Makers, is available for free download in a number of e-book formats under Doctorow’s usual Creative Commons license terms. (I gather it has been for a while.) One of the available versions is a Webkit web appbook that Peter Wayner created for the iPhone (or other small-screen devices). It is a set of webpages that have been specially formatted to read in Mobile Safari. The idea is that you use the “+” button in Mobile Safari to send it to the launcher, where it drops the Safari interface and looks and...

Clay Shirky posts on his blog about the recent open letter from the American Booksellers Association to the Justice Department, asking them to investigate Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target for pricing best-sellers below $10. (Amazon’s $9.99 e-books in particular are singled out for comment.) The ABA believes that this low pricing will “devalue” books, and lead to further attrition among already-beleaguered bookstores. Shirky writes that many bookstore-lovers are echoing the ABA’s arguments. He suggests that many of these are doing so not out of any inherent love for the book, but because they like their local bookstores and...

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! A number of other sites are doing Thanksgiving lists (Ars Technica, Wired, another Wired, and Wired again on things not to be thankful for), and I thought I would assay one of my own. Of course, we all know that we have a lot more to be thankful for than just e-book-related things, but they are this site’s focus after all. There are a lot of people and companies that have made a difference in the e-book industry this year, and I thank the ones important to me below. These are the folks...

The recent post about book scanners that can process 3,000 pages per minute reminded me (and at least one other person) of the Vernor Vinge novel Rainbows End. Since it had been a while since I had read that novel, I decided to take another look. For a while, the novel was posted free in its entirety on Vernor Vinge’s website. It has since been taken down; however, the Internet Archive still has it available in its entirety in the Wayback Machine’s archive of the page. I’m actually surprised nobody reviewed it here back when it was newly published, but I...

Cory Doctorow’s latest column in the Guardian talks about his practice of giving away free e-book versions of his print books, and his recommendation that others do the same. Booksellers – I'm a former one myself – know that personal recommendations from friends are the best way to sell books – better than reviews, better than covers, better than store-placement. A publisher's publicity and marketing for a book is an excellent way to get it into some readers' hands, and the word of mouth enabled by freely copyable ebooks then acts as a force-multiplier to expand...

Mur Lafferty has a post on Tor.com about the Worldcon panel where Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow discussed how giving away works for free helped them sell more copies. (They also have audio of the panel for download—which I won’t link directly here for the same reason I don’t hotlink images. Go to tor.com, read and download for yourself.) Gaiman discussed the fun he had “in my own slow way nudging HarperCollins out of the stone ages and into the dark ages” with the free time-limited giveaways of American Gods and Neverwhere e-books. (“Dark ages” is right. I...