Not everything always goes smoothly over at Amazon. PaidContent reports that, for a few hours Thursday night, it seems Amazon inadvertently disabled the Kindle e-book buy buttons on Big Six publishers (and who knows what other publishers?) for a few hours. The company reported it was a “technical issue”. It also affected users’ ability to buy Kindle e-books or download titles they’d already bought. The funny thing to me is that this little glitch wouldn’t even be a news item if it weren’t for Amazon’s habit of turning off buy buttons to punish publishers who won’t give it the...

Today the Department of Justice finally got around to posting over 850 comments it received on its proposed anti-trust settlement with three agency pricing publishers—along with its own response (PDF) to the concerns and issues raised by the comments it received. In summary, the Department of Justice considered all the relevant issues raised by the comments, pro and con, and found nothing sufficient to convince it to budge one iota from the settlement plans it had drawn up. Of those comments, fewer than 70 were in support of the settlement, and the rest were opposed. (However, hundreds of those...

The Justice Department suit against the publishers and Apple for introducing agency pricing is not seeking damages—just a change in the way publishers price. However, the competing class-action lawsuits filed by various law firms and a number of state attorney generals are seeking damages, and therein lies a bit of a snarl-up. PaidContent has an interesting article looking at the matter at great length. The publishers who settled with the DoJ have also been settling with states to the tune of millions of dollars, and this creates a problem for the lawyers who filed the non-state-related class action firms—the...

The experiment is over. On article-reformatting utility Readability’s blog, CEO Rich Zlade announced that Readability is ending its 15-month-old reader fees for publisher payment program, in which it collected donations from subscribers to pay out to publishers of sites that Readability users reformatted to skip ads.  Why end the program? Zlade explains that, although “thousands of [readers] agreed to spend $5 a month (and sometimes more)” on the project, relatively few publishers signed up. Out of the “millions—yes, millions—of domains” whose content was reformatted, only about 2,000 bothered to sign up to claim their share of the...

Here’s another article from an exec of a Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) publisher about “disintermediating Amazon,” this one on Publishers Weekly. John Oakes of OR Books puts Amazon’s success in an interesting perspective when he points out that, when you get right down to it, the main advantage Amazon really has is “a comfortingly familiar Web site” that didn’t even exist at all just a few years ago. What is it selling? Its ability to sell. What if publishers were to sell e-books and print books direct, straight to consumers—and consumers were to get used to the idea...

On FutureBook, blogger “Agent Orange” discusses the way manuscript consideration times have ballooned in recent years. Where it used to be a known standard that editors should take only one month to decide whether to offer or reject, now manuscripts can be held for a year or more without the authors hearing anything about them. While this might have flown in days before the Internet, now authors have social media and can communicate their anger with their publishers to other authors who might then be inclined not to do business with that publisher. And that’s not the worst of...

Publishing Perspectives has another of those guest-column-cum-self-promotional pieces it runs every so often, this one from Jonas Lennermo, creative director of Publit—the company who provides the e-commerce solution used by Harlequin Scandinavia, as well as several large and 200 small publishers in Scandinavia. Lennermo discusses the benefits of publishers selling their books D2C (Direct To Consumer), bringing up O’Reilly and McSweeney’s as examples. (But not Baen, for some reason. Everyone always seems to forget about Baen.) But while O’Reilly and McSweeney’s are publishers who know how to do D2C with smashing success, they also use proprietary, self-developed systems that...

Libertarian think-tank the Ludwig von Mises Institute is carrying an article by self-published author Genevieve LaGreca about “Dead-Tree Luddites”. But it’s not, as you might expect, about those people who insist they love “the smell of books” and won’t ever read an e-reader, which is the image that phrase immediately brings to mind for TeleRead regulars (or at least for me). Instead, it’s aimed squarely at the agency pricing publishers and their insistence on clinging to the dead tree business at the expense of e-books. The low pricing of ebooks, scorned by the traditional publishing interests, is the emerging writer's new...

On the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum has a rebuttal to a number of recent posts about e-book production costs and price, including the post by Mathew Ingram that I covered here. Though the article is replete with quotes and counter-arguments, but the central thrust seems to be that publishers ought to be able to charge what they want to—but they really should be wanting to charge less. At base, copyright holders have the right to ask what they want to get for their work (which is why they were so concerned about Amazon selling ebooks...

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...

A court in the UK has issued an order compelling UK ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay, the BBC reports. Previously, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) music lobby group had asked the ISPs to do so voluntarily, but they had declined to do so without an actual court order. Critics of the move warn that it could represent the start of a slippery slope toward censoring sites promoting other causes or behaviors. ISP Virgin Media told the BBC that content providers need to offer a carrot as well as a stick: "As a...

One of the things heralded by the Department of Justice settlement is that it might allow book/e-book sellers to experiment with new ways of selling or packaging their products. Jane Litte at Dear Author writes about three possible experimental models she would like to see bookstores and publishers try out. One model is adding different types of subscription offerings, like Audible.com’s monthly audiobook memberships. If publishers with extensive backlists offered subscription pricing for older books, it could lead to selling more of their new books. She also proposes selling “best of” bundles, in which part or all of a...