Amazon vs Hachette
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Amazon Faces Off Against Penguin Random House
Last year’s battle between Amazon and Hachette over book prices and online sales seems only to have been a portent of an ongoing crisis between publishers and the online retailer. While HarperCollins was able to rather quickly negotiate a deal earlier…
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Less Fight in Latest Amazon Deal
Last year, Amazon went to war with Hachette. Since then, the remaining big publishers have been cutting their own deals with the retail giant. Macmillan, who also had a spat with Amazon in 2010, inked a deal in December. HarperCollins…
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The Scorpion Always Bites the Turtle
During Amazon’s skirmish with Hachette, one group that rallied to Amazon’s defense were the self-published authors who claimed that the Kindle allowed their overlooked voices a platform. Now, those authors find themselves sinking as the online retailer has turned on…
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Hachette Turns to Twitter
Amazon and Hachette finally resolved their ongoing dispute last month, but the fracas served to illustrate the risk involved with relying on Amazon for such a huge portion of sales. As a result, Hachette is looking to diversify its digital…
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The Making of Michael Pietsch
Amazon and Hachette have, for now, resolved their dispute. But their protracted battle over pricing has made Hachette’s Chief Executive Michael Pietsch something of a hero to many in the literary community—in Distinction, Pietsch discusses his journey from a small Boston publishing…
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Throwing Hachette to the Wolves
Amazon and Hachette appear to have entered into a war of attrition, a battle that Hachette, with a more limited budget, is surely going to lose. Alone, Hachette will fall. News that Simon & Schuster easily signed a deal with…
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Year One of Day One
Whether Amazon proves friend or foe to the literary cause, its year-old literary journal Day One seems to be putting everyone in an awkward position. Boris Kachka covers its birthday party for Vulture: Genres sell briskly as e-books, while the…
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The Orwellian Blunders of Amazon
For Melville House, Alex Shephard examines Amazon’s fraught relationship with George Orwell’s publisher Hachette, criticizing the online shopping hub for misappropriating Orwell’s views on paperback publishing: In context, Orwell not only contradicts Amazon’s argument about paperbacks, he contradicts their entire business…
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Choosing Sides
Andrew Wylie, arguably the most powerful literary agent in the world, has chosen sides in the Amazon-Hachette battle for global domination, and he’s allied with Authors United. Wylie represents a slew of high-profile writers like Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, and…
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For Whom Amazon Tolls
As the Amazon versus Hachette dispute drags on into its fifth month, Alex Shepard, over at Melville House, examines the conflict, and what it means for publishers and authors: Traditional publishers can’t do what Amazon does; Amazon can’t do what traditional…
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An Author Defends Amazon
As the Amazon-Hachette war rages on, it seems that not many writers have any kind words for Amazon. But in Slate, author Neal Pollack can’t seem to say enough nice things.
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Win Or Lose, Amazon War Means Change
No matter how the dispute between publisher Hachette and online mage-retailer Amazon resolves itself, the one thing that can be assured is that the publishing industry is changing. Amazon might hope to accelerate and seize control of the changes through…