amazon
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Amazon Monopoly Threatens Everything
Amazon just turned twenty years old. Even though the company might be too young to celebrate with champagne, competitors have begun to levy charges that the online retailer is becoming a monopoly. While Amazon’s tentacles spread across many retail sectors,…
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Publishers Earn More than Authors on E-Book Sales
Authors are earning less on e-books than on physical ones, and the villain isn’t necessarily Amazon. According to the Author’s Guild, a professional organization for writers, publishers are now taking closer to 75% of an e-book’s profit, up from only…
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Amazon Knows Your Friends
Amazon is deciding who you are friends with—even if you aren’t. The retailer is using that information to scrub book reviews from customers who might be friends with authors, reports the Guardian. Though the tight-lipped company won’t reveal the formula…
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Earn Fractions of a Penny With Amazon
Last month Amazon announced it planned on paying authors participating in its lending library program by number of pages read. The system is intended to encourage better content and reward longer works. Now, the Guardian reveals that some payments to…
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Are Romance Novels Ruining Subscription Services?
All-you-can-read subscription services are finding that readers of romance novels are heavy users. The service Scribd is removing some romance titles because voracious sex-fiends are reading too many of the sultry books. Over at Electric Lit, Lincoln Michel explains why…
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Are Books Getting Dumber Because We Want Them To?
Over at Bloomberg View, Stephen L. Carter examines the Amazon of the Victorian era, a book distributor named Charles Edward Mudie, and how readers are really to blame for literary fiction’s struggle to find a readership. Carter writes about Mudie…
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Ursula Le Guin Eschews Amazon in Favor of Healthy Diet
Amazon uses the BS Machine to sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we begin to think that’s what literature is. I believe that reading only packaged microwavable fiction ruins the taste, destabilizes the moral blood pressure, and makes…
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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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Amazon: The Root of Book Littering?
The strange case of the “Literature Litterbug”—a mystery perp who’s been dumping used books along a Colorado highway for a year or more—has come to a close, bringing with it a pun-filled police report and plenty of finger-pointing. Glenn Plasden…
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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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Books Without Books
If you’re old enough to remember VHS cassettes, its likely you also remember the revolutionary straight-to-video category of movies. Now, Audible wants to do the same for literature with straight-to-audiobooks. Audible, an Amazon subsidiary, is a key player in the…
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The Queen of Steam
“I was like, Either I’m a sexual deviant, which is always a possibility, or they’re wrong,” says Engler of publishers’ reluctance to print raunchy material. She sips from a can of Grapeade. “Turned out they were wrong.” At Vulture, Phoebe…