The hits just keep on coming. On PaidContent, Laura Hazard Owen writes about a new filing in a class-action lawsuit against the agency pricing publishers that reveals some previously redacted evidence in the case shedding light on the agency pricing negotiations. This is the suit in which a number of states (now up to 31 including DC and Puerto Rico) seek monetary damages, in addition to the DoJ’s class action settlement. In one case, Macmillan CEO John Sargent asked Apple if they might consider relaxing their 30% take for new-release “hardcover” e-books to help ease the pain of their...

“I love the manuscript, but…” It seems those words, expressed in a publisher rejection notice, tend to herald one writer after another’s ventures into self-publishing. In this case, Jessica Park, guest-blogging on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s “Mystery Writing is Murder” blog, explains why she took her young-adult novel Flat-Out Love to Amazon self-publishing, where it has sold over 75,000 copies and received 372 reviews averaging 4.6 stars. Park had previously published a five-book murder mystery series through a traditional publisher. The problems with Flat-Out Love, Park was told by the publishers who rejected it, were that the 18-year-old college...

Are agents still necessary in the new e-publishing world? I’m running across a number of people who don’t seem to think so. For example, self-publishing writer Stephen Leather opined in a recent interview with The Bookseller Magazine: I think agents will be the hardest hit by the eBook revolution. There is almost no negotiation with Amazon over royalty rates so if you are dealing with them it’s pointless to pay an agent fifteen per cent. It used to be agents who acted as the gatekeepers – more trendy jargon – and they pretty much decided who...

The Bookseller has a brief report on a London roundtable in which some publishers and booksellers sounded a warning about library e-book lending. Waterstones m.d. James Daunt said that library e-lending could be disruptive to bricks-and-mortar booksellers. “If you can download a book for free and read it, why would you want to own it?” Daunt further noted that booksellers have had things “extremely easy” for a long time, and have lost focus on “the basic discipline of retailing.” He suggested that there is an opportunity for booksellers to learn to improve their financial focus and learn to run...

FutureBook has a piece looking at the rate of e-book adoption in the UK, which is still a few years behind the US but growing year to year. The first half of the article is a confusing flood of statistics, but it seems to conclude that, as of the end of 2011, e-book sales accounted for about 10% of the total book business among trade publishers in the UK. By comparison, Hachette stated that in the USA e-books made up 28% of its adult trade sales in the first quarter of 2012. The article also looks at what the...

The New York Times has an interesting piece by Julie Bosman positing that, thanks to the ease with which e-books now allow authors to publish and self-publish, and let readers buy instantaneously, authors are now feeling “obligated” to write more, faster. Rather than publish the “usual” one book per year, authors are pressured to “[pull] the literary equivalent of a double shift” and write more frequently. “It used to be that once a year was a big deal,” said Lisa Scottoline, a best-selling author of thrillers. “You could saturate the market. But today the culture is...

Caroline Vanderlip, CEO of SharedBook, has an opinion piece on Inside Higher Ed stating that “going digital” is not a panacea that will automatically bring about lower prices for textbooks. Much as publishers of mass market fiction have been saying, if the costs of producing the material remain the same, the price of the textbook will stay about the same whether the distribution method is digital or electronic. And OER (open educational resources” material will not necessarily change this either, at least for a while—there just isn’t very much of it yet. Vanderlip writes that the best way of...

BoingBoing has a brief but interesting piece from a representative of Douglas County Libraries in Colorado (which we mentioned in March), which has created its own e-book lending system by dealing directly with publishers, rather than relying on a third party such as Overdrive to mediate between them. DCL has cut deals with over 800 publishers to have their works lent through DCL’s system. The library doesn’t rely only on its own system, however; it also offers books from the Overdrive and 3M platforms, as well as Freegal music. The books are available through the physical branch locations, or...

Marvel Comics has opened a new on-line comics store on Marvel.com, powered by comiXology. It offers “hundreds of collections” and other titles, and allows access to those titles from anywhere, including via the Marvel Comics iOS and Android devices. It is also cross-compatible with the Marvel Comics on Chrome store, meaning that purchases made through Chrome will show up on Marvel.com. Perhaps most importantly, if you purchase a digital comic on Marvel.com, you can now read it on the Marvel Comics app for your iOS or Android device. This will allow for a more complete digital...

PaidContent has a piece by Jeff John Roberts looking at the current status of the Authors Guild vs. Google court case involving Google’s actions in scanning millions of copyrighted e-books. The case is moving slowly forward with new motions presented today, that Judge Chin has promised to rule on later. The Authors Guild wants Chin to okay its request for class-action status to let the US’s writers sue together. Google argues that the Guild doesn’t have standing to sue on authors’ behalf, and the suits should be brought by individual authors who feel they have been wronged—and that the...

It’s no secret that one of the justifications behind publishers keeping e-book prices high is that they cost almost as much as paper books cost to publish, so they have to sell them at high prices in order to make a profit. But Mathew Ingram has an insightful post on GigaOm in which he points out that the crucial point in e-book pricing is not what the books cost to make, but what consumers are wiling to pay. Ingram points out that consumers probably do underestimate what it costs to make a book, noting that publishers do “have a...

They’re nowhere near as big as Tor, but the Bookseller reports that Duncan Baird Publishers, a UK publisher of illustrated mind, body, and spirit and cookery books, has announced it will be removing restrictive digital rights management (DRM) from 150 of its current and 80 future e-book titles in order to provide a better experience for readers. It is not clear from the Bookseller piece what percentage of Duncan Baird’s overall catalog this represents. Duncan Baird is writing to authors to tell them of its decision, which has met with mixed response. “There are some authors...