With the news this morning that Scribd has thrown in the towel on unlimited ebook subscriptions, Amazon is the last player standing with an “all-you-can-eat” ebook subscription offer for a general audience. The juxtaposition of the publishers’ insistence on being paid full price for ebooks being lent once and the late Oyster’s and the now thrice-hobbled […]
Rethinking what’s happening with ebook prices
Could I have gotten the DoJ impact on ebook pricing completely wrong? Could the elimination of the Apple-mandated pricing bands actually be such a good thing for publishers that loosening the restraints on discounting won’t actually disrupt the marketplace? The early evidence seems to point that way although we need to emphasize the word “early”. […]
Some brief comment on news items from this week
Wiley announced a few months ago that they wanted to sell some of their most consumer-oriented lines of books (although, as Cader makes clear, what they announced they wanted to sell constituted only about 20% of the sales volume of the division that houses these titles.) The first sale under that initiative was announced this […]
Perhaps the revolution has reached an evolutionary stage
The dizzying pace at which US consumers were switching from print to digital couldn’t last forever. Based on the numbers being published by the AAP, with a huge assist in interpretation by Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch, it seems that the slowdown has become very noticeable in the past 12 months. Between late 2007 when […]
Jane Litte explains the DoJ suit very well, and I have a couple of points to add
Jane Litte at the DearAuthor blog has written a remarkably concise, clear, and cogent piece about the DoJ case. This whole paragraph is a link to it. That’s a signal. In fact, if this is a subject of high interest to you and you are not a lawyer, I would encourage you to read Jane’s post before you […]