Online sales

When Shakespeare wrote, "What's past is prologue" in The Tempest, he could never have imagined that the phrase would be used for a consumer promotion in China. But millions of Chinese understand perfectly why e-commerce giant Alibaba adopted it as a marketing slogan for its hugely successful Singles' Day.  Read more

Three of publishing's most important organizations have teamed up to write a letter to the chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee investigating the market power of Big Tech to press their case that, over the last several years, Amazon's growing dominance over book publishing and bookselling has fundamentally altered the competitive framework of the industry.  Read more

"I see them as kind of a great white shark. You don't really want to mess with them." The words are those of a former manager at Amazon - and she is describing her former employer.

It is an apt analogy. Amazon is huge - worth $740bn (£530bn) at Monday night's share price - but it moves fast and is a lethal predator.

LAST March, Amazon quietly changed the way it sells books. An obscure and seemingly harmless modification to its website has opened the door for some third-party sellers to deceive Amazon's customers by selling books as "new" that may not come straight from a publisher or its wholesaler, thus depriving authors of royalties they should have earned from the sale of a new book.

"Bookselling was and is for me a cultural and political expression, an expression of progressive change, of challenge to oppressive authority, of a search for a community of values which can act as an underpinning of a better world.  Read more