Friday, September 6, 2013

Publishing Industry News

Publishing news and industry blogs for 8/24-9/6/2013. Not a terribly busy week--I think most Americans, at least, spent too much time nursing sunburns after Labor Day to make too much news.

Publishing News

Spectacular Solutions and Balboa Press hit the Writer's Beware page, as does Sandpiper Publicity.

Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could get the e-book cheap when you bought a paper and ink book? Well, Amazon's MatchBook is making that finally happen.

Remember hearing about how careful you have to be about FaceBook promotions? They've amended their official policy, in ways that will make authors much happier.

Both Amazon and Overstock have filed suit in the Supreme Court to stop the ruling that would force them to collect sales tax for online sales to New York. American BookSellers Association responds to this with a cheeky note, taking Amazon to task for claiming to support online sales tax.

In the Apple vs the DOJ case, the DOJ lightens the injunction against Apple, after telling Apple to put their objections in an itemized list (more or less). Macmillan has to wait the longest (4 years) to renegotiate its deals with Apple, but at least they're renegotiable, instead of terminated, right? Meanwhile, in the settlements by the publishers, refunds for e-books rise.

Google and the Authors' Guild are still going at it, eight years in, on the Google bookscanning case. (Quick refresher: Google scanned library books for its Google Books project. The Authors' Guild says this violates copyright. Google Books says that it counts as fair use. There's a lot more to it than that, but we'll stop there.)

Amazon and Kobo both release new version of e-readers.

Figshare launches a platform for colleges to host academic research and make it available, citeable, searchable, and basically discoverable.

This year's Hugo Award Winners are out.


Industry Blogs

QueryTracker's Publishing Pulse for 8/30 and 9/6.

Nathan Bransford's Last Few Weeks in Books for 8/26.

Getting bullied on GoodReads? Heard about an incident where an author decided not to publish? Writing on the Ether discusses what really happened and talks about bullying, GoodReads, and escalation.

Publishers Weekly takes a look at Kobo's relationship with the American Booksellers Association, one year in. Also, GalleyCat offers a guide on how to buy from your local indie bookstore through Kobo.

And a brief look at current book-buying behavior, again by Publishers Weekly.

Speaking of which, how many e-books have been self-published on Smashwords? Now over 250,000.

About to launch a book? Jared Dees posts a nice guide for getting the word out.

No comments:

Post a Comment