This article titled “Amazon launches UK Kindle Store” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 5th August 2010 14.11 UTC

Amazon today launched its UK Kindle Store, with more than 400,000 ebooks now available to download. The price and scope of the digitised books marks a significant point in Amazon’s move towards domination in the ebooks market.

Up against increasing competition in the market, Amazon last week unveiled two more advanced versions of its Kindle e-reader.

The company is looking to pick up consumers who cannot afford Apple’s iPad. In the US, Amazon has slashed the price of its Kindle device to compete with the iPad, which uses the iBook store to sell ebooks.

More than 80 of the 100 Nielsen UK bestsellers are available to download from the new UK store, retailing at relatively low prices. One of the new bookstore’s featured authors, the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, last week became the first author to sell more than 1m ebooks through Amazon.

Larsson’s novel The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is currently second in the Kindle store’s bestsellers list and available for £2.70 to UK buyers.

“The Kindle Store offers the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read at low prices,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle content at Amazon.

In the US, digital books account for 6% of consumer sales. Many publishers now realise the need to follow the direction of the market.

Amazon’s new Kindle devices are lighter, faster and smaller than the previous generation. The Wi-Fi model costs £109 in the UK, while the model supporting both Wi-Fi and 3G will retail at £149 – both around £25 more than the US retail price.

Previously, UK Kindle owners had to get their device shipped from the US, with subsequent book purchases retailed in dollars.

Greg Greeley, vice president of European retail at Amazon, said: “The opening of the UK Kindle Store allows customers to buy content in pounds sterling and offers a great shopping experience including UK customer reviews, recommendations, bestseller lists and customer service.”

Though Amazon rarely releases definitive figures on Kindle sales, the company says the original device has sold “millions” – it has been the bestselling item on Amazon.com for two years running.

Last month, the company revealed that it sold 143 Kindle ebooks for every 100 hardbacks sold in the previous three months in the US, although no figures were released about the relative proportion of paperbacks sold in this time.

Amazon and Apple face investigations into their ebook retailing. The office of Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut attorney general, says that the companies could be “potentially depriving consumers of competitive prices” and that the burgeoning nature of the market “warranting [a] prompt review of the potential anti-consumer impacts.”

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This article titled “Penguin boss has no problem with ebooks” was written by David Teather, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 29th July 2010 20.59 UTC

Penguin this week celebrates its 75th year and is marking the anniversary by repackaging a series of seminal books from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although the company might afford itself a brief look backwards, it feels as though there is little room for nostalgia in book publishing now, as the industry turns its face firmly – and apprehensively – to the future.

Amazon last week announced sales of ebooks on its US site had outnumbered hardbacks for the first time, stunning casual observers, even if it had not been entirely unexpected in the trade.

The launch of the iPad has added a sense of urgency. Where music went first, books are set to follow, although Penguin and other publishers would hope without the same devastating effects. Amazon this week launched a cheaper, more lightweight version of its Kindle ebook reader and a digital store on its UK site, while others, including Google, are muscling in. Digital book sales are still less than 1% of Penguin, but the direction of the market is clear. In the US, digital books already account for 6% of consumer sales.

Penguin chief executive John Makinson says he is a convert. The day after we meet he is on his way to India, as part of David Cameron’s delegation, and had loaded titles on to his iPad, including a manuscript by John le Carré and some Portuguese classics (in English) ahead of Penguin launching a range in Brazil. He is also reading Lord Mandelson’s diary. It simply makes sense, he says, instead of carting an armful of books in your carry-on luggage.

Innovation

“It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us,” he says. “Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there are worries around pricing and around piracy, royalty rates and so on, but there is also this huge opportunity to do more as publishers.”

Publishing, he says, must embrace innovation: “I am keen on the idea that every book that we put on to an iPad has an author interview, a video interview, at the beginning. I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. There has to be a culture of experimentation, which doesn’t come naturally to book publishers. We publish a lot of historians, for example. They love the idea of using documentary footage to illustrate whatever it is they’re writing about.”

The very definition of a book is up for grabs he says, although the company has just published a version of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth for the iPad in the US that might provide clues – and horrify traditionalists. It includes scenes from a TV adaptation embedded in the text, as well as extras including the show’s music soundtrack and Follett’s video diary during the making of the series.

For now, Makinson says, digital books are expanding the market; hardback sales in the US are up this year, despite the march of ebooks. Piracy is not yet a significant issue and lessons have been learned from the music business.

“You have to give the consumer what the consumer wants – you can’t tell the consumer to go away. So we didn’t participate in this experiment where a number of publishers deferred publication of the ebook until a certain number of months after the hardcover publication. I thought that was a very bad idea. If the consumer wants to buy a book in an electronic format now, you should let the consumer have it.”

He has added confidence, because with tablets such as the iPad, consumers are used to paying a subscription to the wireless operator and for “apps”, creating a more benign environment than the wild west of the PC, where users are used to getting everything for free.

Penguin’s profits more than doubled to £44m in the first half of the year. The company gained market share, but one reason for the dramatic improvement was the outsourcing of some design and production to India last year; the company now has around 100 designers in Delhi making books for Dorling Kindersley, belying the idea that Britain can at least live off its creative industries. Makinson defends the decision and says DK is now back in profit, which means it can reinvest in Britain: “We can’t pretend we can do everything here. In order to be internationally competitive, some work needs to be done in other places.”

About 8% of the publisher’s sales are from its classics, including Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and revenues are still growing, despite much of the copyright being in the public domain. It is launching the range in Mandarin, Korean and Portuguese. But it is not all highbrow. What would Penguin’s founder, Sir Allen Lane, whose aim was to publish quality paperbacks for the masses, have made of Penguin putting out books “by” Peter Andre or Ant & Dec?

“Allen Lane’s view was that we should publish good writing of all kinds for all audiences at affordable prices,” Makinson says. “I’m not saying he would necessarily have approved every single publishing decision we take, but would he have approved of Penguin being a very democratic publishing company, publishing for lots of different tastes? I think he would definitely have approved.”

Makinson has long been mentioned as a successor to Dame Marjorie Scardino, who runs Pearson, Penguin’s parent company. Her departure has been a perennial question, though she has defied the investment community’s chattering classes by staying in her post for well over a decade. She has also confounded expectations by keeping Penguin and the Financial Times in a group dominated by educational publishing. Makinson says it now makes more sense than ever for Penguin to remain part of the group, as the digital era draws each division closer.

He says there will still be the need for publishers in the digital world: “I used to have this discussion with [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author] Douglas Adams. He created this thing called the digital village, an online publishing platform. Douglas’s argument was, ‘all of my friends will come along and publish on digital village and you the publishers will be disintermediated, you will be irrelevant’. Well, it hasn’t happened. I am not aware of any successful direct to consumer publishing model that exists.

“The reason it doesn’t work is that the publishers do actually perform quite a useful service: they edit the book, then they publicise it.” In the physical world, they make sure it is stocked in bookshops, he adds.

Clubbable

Makinson, 55, perhaps feels more adaptable than some of his counterparts because he arrived at Penguin as an outsider. A clubbable character, he has taken an unusual career path, from a journalist on the Financial Times, to working for the Saatchis, setting up his own investment consultancy, running the Financial Times and then becoming Pearson finance director, despite having no training as an accountant.

But his passion for books is evident. Five years ago, he and his brother bought a bookshop in the small Norfolk town of Holt. For an out-of-the-way independent, the Holt Bookshop attracts a starry line-up of authors for events, including Stephen Fry, due to talk about his new autobiography, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is published by Penguin.

“We are all terribly sentimental about books,” Makinson insists. “It is terribly important to me that we sell lots of wonderful books in my little independent in Norfolk, and when I talk about digital I do sometimes worry that it looks as though I am neglecting all this,” he points to the books on the shelves behind him, “which I am not.”

CV

Born: 1954, Derby.

Education: Graduated from Cambridge with honours in English and History.

Career: 1976-1979, journalist, Reuters; 1979-1986, journalist, Financial Times; 1986-1989, vice-chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi; 1989-1994, co-founder of capital markets advisory firm Makinson Cowell; 1994-1996, managing director, Financial Times; 1996-2002, finance director, Pearson; 2002-present, chairman and chief executive Penguin Books.

Other interests: chairman of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a director of the National Theatre and of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organisation.

Family: Married with two daughters.

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This article titled “Stieg Larsson becomes first author to sell 1m ebooks on Amazon” was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 28th July 2010 13.27 UTC

The late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson has beaten Stephenie Meyer and James Patterson to become the first author to sell more than one million ebooks on Amazon.

The online retailer said yesterday that Larsson, author of the Millennium trilogy, had become the first member of its new “Kindle Million Club”, for authors whose work has sold over a million copies in Amazon’s Kindle store in the US. The crime novelist is likely to be joined by thriller writer Patterson – Amazon said last week that it had sold over 860,000 of his ebooks – while Twilight scribe Meyer, Sookie Stackhouse creator Charlaine Harris and queen of romantic suspense Nora Roberts have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books in the US.

“Larsson’s books have captivated millions of readers around the world and ignited a voracious interest in the lives of its main characters Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blomqvist,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle content. “It’s been exciting to have been a part of introducing so many people to these great books.”

The novelist’s three books – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – currently top Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list, and are also in the top 10 bestselling Kindle books of all time, according to the retailer.

The books have also topped Amazon’s UK Kindle chart for “a good few months”, said Iain Millar, marketing manager at Larsson’s UK publisher Quercus, and are currently at the top of Waterstone’s ebook bestseller list.

But Millar said that UK ebook sales for Larsson were “nowhere near the million mark, which is indicative of the extent to which the US ebook market is ahead of ours”.

“Broadly, the print books are equally popular in the States and in the UK, but uptake of the electronic version is much higher there, primarily because a much higher proportion of book customers in the States own ebook devices,” he said.

Quercus has sold 3.3m copies of Larsson’s books in the UK, and estimates that worldwide sales of the three novels are somewhere between 35-40m copies, “but they are literally selling too fast to count”, said Millar.

The news about Larsson’s ebook sales follows Amazon’s announcement last week that over the past three months it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardback books. Kindle sales accelerated in the past month alone, when the online retailer said it sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardbacks. The figures cover Amazon’s US book business, include hardback sales when there is no Kindle edition and exclude free Kindle books.

The retailer made no mention of the proportion of paperback salesto Kindle sales, but founder Jeff Bezos stressed that ebooks were not cannibalising print, saying that hardback purchases at Amazon were still growing and that Kindles had overtaken them regardless.

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This article titled “Celebrated authors bypass publishing houses to sell ebooks via Amazon” was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 22nd July 2010 13.51 UTC

An eye-wateringly stellar list of authors, from Philip Roth to Orhan Pamuk, Martin Amis and John Updike, is bypassing publishers to sell digital editions of books directly to readers, via Amazon.

The brainchild of uber-agent Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie, Odyssey Editions launches today. It offers 20 modern literary classics as ebooks for the first time, exclusively via Amazon.com’s Kindle store. The books, all priced at Amazon’s usual ebook rate of .99, range from Amis’s London Fields, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival to titles from the estates of dead authors such as John Updike, William S Burroughs, Saul Bellow and Hunter S Thompson.

The authors all share Wylie as their agent, and the move makes good on his threat last month that, dissatisfied with the terms publishers have been offering for ebooks, he would remove them from the equation.

“We will take our 700 clients, see what rights are not allocated to publishers, and establish a company on their behalf to license those ebook rights directly to someone like Google, Amazon.com, or Apple. It would be another business, set up on parallel tracks to the frontlist book business,” he told Harvard Magazine in June.

The exclusive deal with Amazon, which will last for two years, effectively removes other booksellers from the equation as well: modern classics including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas will only be sold through the internet retailer.

“As the market for ebooks grows, it will be important for readers to have access in ebook format to the best contemporary literature the world has to offer,” said Wylie, who worked with the UK company Enhanced Editions on the digital project. “This publishing programme is designed to address that need, and to help ebook readers build a digital library of classic contemporary literature.”

The move is likely to concern publishers. In December, Random House wrote to agents informing them of its belief that it holds exclusive rights to digital editions of the “vast majority” of its backlist titles, even those acquired before electronic rights were specifically included in contracts. That letter enraged authors, and the Authors Guild issued a statement saying that “publishers acquire only the rights that they bargain for; authors retain rights they have not expressly granted to publishers. E-book rights, under older book contracts, were retained by the authors.”

The guild also pointed to a 2001 court ruling, which dismissed Random House’s claim that its copyright had been breached when ebook publisher Rosetta Books acquired digital rights in eight novels by the American writers Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron.

But Random House – which publishes physical editions of some of the Odyssey titles – looks set to challenge the new venture. Spokesman Stuart Applebaum said in a statement that the publisher was “disappointed by Mr Wylie’s actions”.

He continued: “Last night, we sent a letter to Amazon disputing their rights to legally sell these titles, which are subject to active Random House publishing agreements. Upon assessing our business options, we will be taking appropriate action.”

Eleven of the Odyssey titles will be available globally, according to Amazon.com. The tension between publishers and authors over ebook rights has also been growing in the UK: earlier this month historian and novelist Tom Holland, chair of the Society of Authors, said that the deals authors were being asked to sign up to for ebooks were “not remotely fair”.

The current standard royalty for ebooks in the UK is 25%, but authors believe it should be 50%, as digital editions have lower warehousing and distribution costs.

American literary agent Robert Gottlieb, chairman of the Trident Media Group, said agents were also pushing for better royalty rates in the US. “As of this time, publishers are doing their hardest to hold to the 25%. My view is this is a moving target and, as time goes by and the market place becomes more competitive, publishers will have to negotiate ebook royalties on a case-by-case basis,” he said.

Although Gottlieb wished Andrew well in his new venture, he felt that an agent becoming, in effect, a publisher contained “the potential for a conflict of interest with authors and/or estates”, and is not contemplating a similar move himself.

Wylie’s initiative is not the first time authors have looked to bypass publishers. In December, bestselling business author Stephen Covey announced that he had sold exclusive digital rights in two of his bestselling titles to Amazon, cutting out his traditional publisher Simon & Schuster. The deal was made via Rosetta Books, which also struck a similar deal in the US for a collection of titles by Ian McEwan. And with Amazon.com offering authors a royalty of 70% for ebooks sold via its Kindle store, the trend only looks set to continue.

Full list of titles published by Odyssey Editions and available on the Kindle:

London Fields by Martin Amis

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

Ficciones (Spanish edition) by Jorge Luis Borges

Junky by William Burroughs

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The Enigma of Arrival by VS Naipaul

The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

Rabbit Run by John Updike

Rabbit Redux by John Updike

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

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Dalkey Book Festival Directors, Sian Smyth, Oliver McCabe and David McWilliams

As one of Ireland’s foremost economists, it is no surprise David McWilliams is conjuring up ways of tackling the recession. What may be surprising, however, is his current method of choice.

McWilliams is a resident of Dalkey, the sleepy village in south county Dublin, which may be best known for its rich and famous inhabitants, but boasts an equally rich literary history.

When confronted with the effects recession was having upon the village, McWilliams and his colleagues in the Dalkey Business Group decided their best course of action would be to capitalise on that literary history.

An open brainstorming session through McWilliams’ column in the Irish Independent led to a solution in the form of the Dalkey Book Festival.

As it transpires, being famous does not preclude one from civic responsibility, and the astounding sense of community displayed in the short time since the festival’s inception has resulted in a programme of events guaranteed to pique the interests of even the most casual literary enthusiast.

Clearly designed with an eye on keeping everyone happy, the events range from the innocent to the macabre; and the high brow to the comic.

David McWilliams and some happy children reading

While Ireland as a whole is well represented on the bill, the organisers are keenly aware of the town’s own literary heritage – with tributes being paid to many of Dalkey’s famous residents past and present. Playwright Bernard Farrell will celebrate the life of the late Hugh Leonard, while Maeve Binchy and Gordon Snell will also be present to give readings.

Not one to hand over all of the spotlight, the town itself has its own degree of celebrity- having provided the backdrop for a prophesising St Augustine, and a crime-fighting James Joyce in Flann O’Brien’s Dalkey Archive. This great work of philosophical absurdity will be explored, both literally and figuratively, in a walk through the novel’s locations, curated by Eamon Morrissey.

Sparing no opportunity to take advantage of their surroundings, the organisers will indulge their gothic side, with a midnight performance of Edgar Allen Poe’s Cask of Amontillado in the ruins of St Begnet’s Church. In contrast, the Vico nightclub will provide a suitable stage for the infamous Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, as he recalls his exploits and escapades from his time as DJ at the club.

With the season that is in it, the festival will dutifully acknowledge that the world is currently football mad. Eamon Dunphy and Des Cahill will stop by to discuss the twentieth anniversary of Ireland’s famous World Cup ’90 campaign.

Younger readers will also be kept busy, with frequent readings in the local libray and a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince at the Town Hall. Other highlights of the weekend include talks from Joseph O’Connor, John Connolly, John Waters and Conor McPherson.

The Dalkey Book Festival Logo

The Dalkey Book Festival is a manifestation of a community’s response to challenging times and as events draw to a close on Sunday evening the festival will hold a talk, chaired by McWilliams on the concept of local communities fighting back.

If their own example is anything to go by, there certainly seems to be enough fighting spirit to go round; and if they can’t inspire you, at the very least they will keep you entertained.

You can explore the full programme of events for the Dalkey Book Festival here.

As a writer, he has contributed to several online publications, including Egoeccentric and Connected Magazine.

As a musician he performs with the Irish based alternative-rock band Clockwork Noise.
You can contact Robert at maguire.robert[at]gmail.com

It has been an interesting year so far. The top ten slots are looking by my estimation (and I’d need to do some research to prove it) to be almost the preserve of genre fiction writers.

With Larsson of course leading the pack with three still in the top ten, it is nice to see John Connolly selling so well, he has after all been working the publicity circuit in Ireland very well.

It is also well worth noting the persistence of Mary O’Sullivan in the Top Ten and the arrival of Darren Shan which shows that we have produced more than one best-selling children’s and young adult fiction writer in these last few years!

1: Whisperers,The, John Connolly, 1,591
2: Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest,The, Stieg Larsson, 1,404
3: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,The, Stieg Larsson, 1,252
4: Girl Who Played with Fire,The, Stieg Larsson, 1,010
5: Hard Girls, Martina Cole, 928
6: House Rules, Jodi Picoult, 740
7: Burned:House of Night, P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast, 735
8: Genesis, Karin Slaughter, 660
9: Thin Executioner,The, Darren Shan , 620
10: Under the Rainbow, Mary O’Sullivan, 586

Data Supplied by Nielsen BookScan taken from the Irish Consumer Market week ending 1st May 2010

Blurb Launch Online Bookshow Widget
Interesting. Seems to me that an author with very basic html skills (copy and paste being about the height of requirements) could do this for free using issuu.

Read more…

ONE-OFF FLASH FICTION COMP, DUBLIN REVIEW OF BOOKS
Fun, Fun, Fun, Fun, Fun!
OK, I know I am multi-posting but this looks interesting:
Read more…

E.C. Talbot Press 1940s
I absolutely love this site and the covers are full of impact!
Read more…

International World Book and Copyright Day
David talks about World Book And Copyright day!
Read more…

YOU LAUNCH – SAT 24th APRIL
Good stuff Nuala, enjoy the launch!
Read more…

SiliconRepublic.com: Reviewed: The Amazon Kindle – New Media
Another convert to the old ebook reader
Read more…

The Valley of the Squinting Windows: Delvin Book Fair 2010
Interesting idea!
Read more…

The Book Depository wins Queen’s Award
I love the Book Depository. The price you see = the price, no added delivery!
Read more…

FACELESS MONSTERS – ANTHOLOGY LAUNCH
That is a jolly nice poster
Read more…

Time Magazine Launches Kindle-Exclusive eBook
QUITE a big deal!
Read more…

A deal has been signed.
Good news for Lucy Caldwell
Read more…

By Declan Burke of Crime Always Pays

The publishing industry is in a state of chassis, if I can misquote Sean O’Casey, the Amazon-Macmillan slugfest being the latest example of how the writer and the reader, inarguably the most important elements of the publishing food-chain, are being ill-served by the intermediaries. Writers want to write, readers want to read … it should be easy, right? Nope. Readers are still getting their fill, given that (according to Henry Porter, below) “during the worst recession for 80 years, book sales went down last year by just 1.2% in value and only 0.5% in volume.” On the other hand, writers are having advances slashed and contracts torn up, this when they can get published at all.

A good friend of mine, and a damn fine writer, who shall remain nameless lest the publisher that keeps him on the breadline gets a whiff of sulphur, has advocated on more than one occasion recently that like-minded writers should get together and set up a co-op, akin to the United Artists studio of early Hollywood lore. In theory, it can be done: e-publishing and print-on-demand are just two elements of contemporary technology that allow writers to circumvent the publishing circus and go straight to readers. Okay, it won’t be happening today or tomorrow, but there’s a momentum building that suggests it’s becoming a distinct possibility in the near future. Hell, a media-savvy band of writers that rides the environmentally-friendly ticket (e-pub and POD = more Rain Forest) could discover that Green = the green.

First problem: self-publishing is vanity publishing, right? Leaving aside the fact, as @stevemosby pointed out on Twitter last week, that all publishing is vanity publishing, the idea that it’s bad to have the courage of your convictions appears to be limited to the publishing industry. Quoth Simon Crump on the Guardian Book Blog:

But surely that’s a business model, a standard template for ambition? The conviction that what you’ve got is good enough to release into the wild and stands a reasonable chance of selling is at the heart of launching any new product.

Pausing only to declare an interest, in that I co-published THE BIG O with Hag’s Head, and self-pubbed CRIME ALWAYS PAYS to Kindle, and that I’m thinking of self-publishing in the near future, we’ll move on swiftly to the aforementioned Henry Porter, also on the Guardian Book Blog:

What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.

Heady stuff, folks, in theory at least. But I’m genuinely curious: as a reader (and all writers are readers first and foremost, or the good ones are anyway), what’s your take on the self-published book? Does it come freighted with overweening ambition and reeking of talentless desperation? Or is there the possibility that a self-published novel might simply be one that doesn’t fit the industry’s current requirements? Is there, for that matter, the possibility that there’s a small but perfectly formed audience out there hungry for novels and authors that don’t fit the industry’s current requirements?

I’m not a fool, and these days I certainly can’t afford to be parted from my money by investing in self-published novels and author co-ops and similar fripperies. And yet there’s a part of me that keeps nagging on about how now is the time to get in on the ground floor with self-pub POD, before the big companies wise up and move in with faux-indie offshoots and sponsored writing collectives and the like. Or is it already too late?

The Bookseller is reporting that Gavin de Becker of Gavin de Becker & Associates has signed a deal with Amazon giving the company exclusive rights to sell ebook versions of his titles, The Gift of Fear and Just 2 Seconds (and online sample of Just 2 Seconds can be read here) for one year.

Amazon and Macmillan have reached an agreement over ebook pricing. The buy buttons which Amazon had removed as part of a dispute concerning new pricing arrangements have been re-instituted for all Macmillan titles.

The dispute arose when Macmillan CEO John Sargeant informed Amazon late January that he was proposing a new model for selling ebooks through Amazon. This new model would change the way that books were priced as well as shifting to an “agency” basis whereby Amazon instead of receiving a discount and selling the book at a price of their choosing, would sell books at a price set by the Publisher and receive a commission of 30% on that price.

The “Agency Model” emerged as a point of discussion during discussions between industry players and Apple in the run up to the lauch of Apple’s iPad on 26 January 2010.

RESOURCE READING
~ The Financial Times carries a piececovering the issues in the dispute today that is worth reading.

~ Macmillan placed a statement on US industry website Publishers Marketplace explaining their actions:

Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will be set the price for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.

~ Amazon’s response is freely available too:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.