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Be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it.

Consumer expectations will rise if prices do

Over the weekend, we rode a rollercoaster as Macmillan laid out its demands for ebook pricing to Amazon, and Amazon responded by pulling (nearly) all Macmillan titles from its store. Late Sunday, Amazon announced they would “capitulate” to [...]

Short answer: nobody knows.
Longer answer: the magic elixir publishers are injecting into ebooks in hopes they will entice people to pay higher prices.
As you might guess, I am a bit of an “enhancement” skeptic. I have a few reasons. First, they feel like an attempt to skip the walking phase. Right now ebooks are crawling, [...]

As you might imagine, I am still dissecting the past few months, and today I want to focus on business model. Some of this might seem antithetical to how publishing does business (I actually don’t think so, not if you think about it). It will definitely make some people uncomfortable because it links the actual [...]

This week’s publishing industry debate started when the Wall Street Journal covered Sourcebooks’ release strategy for Bran Hambric: The Fairfield Curse. The article contained some blunt discussion about why the publisher chose to delay the ebook and why others are doing the same. This peek behind the curtain didn’t sit will with readers, exposing tensions [...]

Last week, the Internets were treated to a rather whiny post from an author who felt that agents were the only thing standing between her and literary greatness. The truth of the matter is that it’s a tough business out there, and sometimes it takes talent plus a little something extra to get your work [...]

[BS: Today we bring you a guest post from Joanna Penn, from The Creative Penn blog. As publishing changes, we're seeing increased overlap between worlds that previously seemed like publishing silos. Where do you fall in the quadrant?]
There have been a few posts in the publishing blog world recently that seem to set certain groups [...]

It should come as no surprise that a group of enterprising Amazon customers have joined together to boycott Kindle books priced about $9.99. I’ve been holding my own private boycott for months now, for reasons stated at great length (sorry, Christopher Moore, you were an unwitting catalyst and victim, though another author was a winner). [...]

I kind of wanted to stay out of the way of the ScrollMotion Iceberg iTunes application. While I have issues with the execution — can’t the publishing industry use something akin to, oh, collective clout to create a real iTunes store for books instead of foisting endless application after application (and associated management of said [...]

I have a friend who is heading off to Paris for a long vacation. I guess she wanted to see how the other half — the people who survive in cold parts of the world — live. My Paris experience was in February, standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower on a cold, clear [...]

So, last week there were two big announcements in publishing. The first, of course, was the Google Book Search settlement, which received a huge amount of attention (a trend continuing to this week — it’s that big!). The second was an(other) announcement from Random House that they’re messing around with ebook and digital content royalties.
Let’s [...]