Amazon's latest figures are astounding and cement its dominance of the book business, particularly self-publishing, as well as the huge inroads it is making in many other areas. Read more
It's unusual to find a book chain boss who went into bookselling because he liked reading, but James Daunt, founder of Daunts bookshop chain in London, and CEO of the Waterstones chain in the UK, is that rare animal. Encouragingly, he still maintains that: 'Books still work and always will'. Read more
Two new initiatives from Amazon are worth checking out, one which may help get your books out there and one which seems largely to benefit Amazon's drive to grow its Amazon Prime business. Plus there's also an author outlining how you can get your own ebooks out to an international audience. Read more
So what can we say that's positive about the big changes in the situation for authors over the last few years? It's really a matter of the way writers now have the opportunity to get out there and shape their own destiny. Read more
There's been a lot of discussion recently about how things have changed for writers over the last few years. In some ways it's a radically different picture, in others not so much so. Read more
The growth in self-published books reported last week comes from Amazon, whose DIY print business CreateSpace has become far and away the biggest self-publishing platform in the United States. In a week when the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies reported major declines in sales of trade books, there's also been talk about whether depressed digital sales are hurting Amazon. Read more
Ebook sales plunged in October 2015, with adult books dropping 22% in one month, compared to children's ebooks which went down a whopping 44.7%. As we've discussed elsewhere, the children's market has a strong preference for print books, with both parents and children preferring them. Read more
It's a slightly demanding read, but Mike Shatzkin's latest post on The Shatzkin Files is essential reading if you want to understand the contemporary bookselling scene and how it is increasingly controlled and shaped by the huge conglomerates which dominate the web. Read more
We had intended to report on the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. this week, but all we have been able to glean so far is that it was a busy fair, with a great many successful rights deals, and the new layout of the Fair was generally liked. Read more
According to some sources, the audiobook market is growing rapidly. Orion audio publisher Pandora White called the sector "the fastest-growing in publishing" and Booktrack is growing exponentially, but is the quality of the recordings being sacrificed in order to achieve the lowest price? Read more
The man in the video says there's a simple reason why I'm not rich. "Most people have a scarcity mindset," he explains through a thick Australian accent, addressing the camera like a wise mentor lecturing a student. "Top-tier people-actual movers and shakers that are doing things-have an abundance mindset." Behind him, an ancient sword hangs on the wall. For some reason, he's in a bathrobe.
At the turn of the century a company called Napster launched a service that allowed music lovers to share downloaded tunes via a peer-to-peer online network. The company was sued by copyright owners, and ultimately filed for bankruptcy just three years after its founding. Although Napster's business was ultimately shut down, its influence over how music is listened to was profound. Read more
Available statistics on the UK talking books market vastly underplay its size, says Kelli Fairbrother, who calls for more investment and innovation in the sector.
At the end of another successful Independent Bookshop week, indie author Mo Fanning questions how he can help booksellers sell more copies than the online giants
For the past five years or so, I've read books on my phone. The practice started innocently enough. I write book reviews from time to time, and so publishers sometimes send me upcoming titles that fall roughly within my interests. Read more
If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you'll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Read more
If a publisher's titles aren't available on Amazon, it might as well close shop and find a new line of business. Even the biggest publishers are no match for Amazon's death grip on the book market.
When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI's impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom-with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, in an apparent scheme to profit off her work. Read more
While the focus here is on book discovery to fuel future purchases, and not necessarily tracking and reviewing books, as on Goodreads, there's a lot of overlap with Amazon's other platform for book lovers it acquired back in 2013, and has done little to modernize since. Read more