The playing dirty metaphors have graduated to outright war-tinged with the news of Amazon’s discount onslaught of recent days. (See Saturday’s unscheduled [read emergency] News issue from Shelf Awareness.) Whatever you might call it, a Blitzkrieg or scorched earth tactic, it amounts to a force that bricks-and-mortar bookstores—big chains and mom and pops alike—cannot hope …
Apparently, independent bookstores are receiving phone calls from Amazon. Sorry for being so mean? Nope, more of a just thought I’d ask. Shelf Awareness wove together threads from Seattle’s The Stranger, L.A.’s Skylight Books and our friends Roger and Nancy Page at Island Books for this entertaining ditty on the, um, prospects of indies carrying Kindles.
I’m in a rather Biblical state of mind. Not usual for me—but then having grown up in the fly-over, I suppose it was inescapable that now and again my point of reference should be Old Testament. Signs and wonders and all that, signs and wonders. The difficulty is avoiding the prophetic voice. In the first …
It was announced yesterday that Amazon has worked out a deal to purchase the online book sharing network Goodreads. That’s right, when Amazon takes the reigns later this year, your Goodreads account email and reading profile belong to them. It was just last year that Goodreads moved to an Ingram database from Amazon because of …
Thanks to Shelf Awareness for sharing this article from Brooklyn Based, which nicely summarizes where a lot of indie stores stand with e-books and e-readers. Here’s a helpful excerpt: “Kindle is the main device we equate with e-readers, and it’s no secret that its manufacturer is notoriously competitive. Not only does Amazon sell books at …
You have to read Susanna Burke’s account of walking into a media/tech mogul schmooze-fest in Sun Valley accompanied by only a Lionel Shriver book. It doesn’t take long for her to get chatted up (she describes herself as a naive-looking blonde) by a friend of Jeff Bezos, who then leads her to a table with …
I wish I were a better Buddhist. Actually, I’m not really much of a Buddhist; I’m more a lapsed Catholic with Buddhist aspirations. And I suppose that wishing I were a better Buddhist is probably antithetical. I would master non-attachment and acceptance, and let go of anger. If I were a better Buddhist. Andy Puddicombe, …
It’s great to hear more authors voicing concern about Amazon’s ruthlessness, with Scott Turow and the Author’s Guild getting some press recently and really talking about the issues. Sherman Alexie, who’s been fighting this fight for years and is one of the few authors we know whose site prominently displays a “Shop Indie Bookstores” logo …
It made for a good story last week when some independent booksellers became critical of Seattle’s most famous librarian after she formed a partnership with Amazon to publish a few out-of-print books. What kind of story, though? It all depends on how you frame it. There’s the story that The Seattle Times told last weekend …
For the moment, Eugene author L.J. Sellers has tapped into the mysterious algorithms at Amazon, which has kept her Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series on the Kindle’s bestselling police procedural list for six months. This means Sellers is making money from her books, allowing her to work as, oh, rarest of rare in Writer World, a full-time novelist. Did …
