Every week it seems something new is happening in eBookland to set the ebook cause back a decade or two. Always at the forefront of the reversal of fortune is greed. This week’s menace to eBookland is literary agent Andrew Wylie and his new publishing venture Odyssey. Wylie could have summed up his actions in simple terms: to disserve both his clients and the ebook-buying public. What, you ask, did he do? He agreed to give Amazon exclusive rights for 2 years to his authors’ backlist titles; Wylie will publish the books and exclusively sell them through Amazon. The backlist includes...

Click to Continue   |     |  

Macmillan's CEO John Sargent attended the "Publishing Point" Meetup on Wednesday in NYC and spoke a little about the future of e-book lending, and the potential for publishers to create a new revenue stream from libraries. Eric Hellman attended the session and summarized Sargent's argument on his blog: "[E-book distribution by libraries] is a very thorny problem", said Sargent. In the past, getting a book from libraries has had a tremendous amount of friction. You have to go to the library, maybe the book has been checked out and you have to come back another time. If it's a popular book,...

Click to Continue   |     |