When Amazon offered in December to reward customers who scanned book bar codes in bookstores and then bought the book on Amazon instead, we wrote “Amazon’s strategy could backfire.”

“When Amazon’s sales reps call for an appointment to pitch their list,” we pointed out, “they may find the owners’ phones turned off.” (See Please Shut Off Your Cellphones. This is a Bookshop)”

They did. Barnes & Noble will not carry books published by Amazon’s publishing imprints.

“In a sharp answer to Amazon and its expanding publishing efforts,” writes the New York Times‘ Julie Bosman, “Barnes & Noble said on Tuesday that it would not sell books released by Amazon Publishing in its bookstores. The ban includes books released by New Harvest, a new imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that recently struck a deal to publish and distribute books released by Amazon Publishing’s unit based in New York.

“’Barnes & Noble has made a decision not to stock Amazon published titles in our store showrooms,’ Jaime Carey, the company’s chief merchandising officer, said in a statement. ‘Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain e-books to our customers. Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content. It’s clear to us that Amazon has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest.’”

B&N’s decision may impact negatively on the authors and their agents contemplating selling their authors to Amazon Publishing.

Though some publishing executives may take a measure of satisfaction that B&N, now the victim of Amazon’s aggressive marketing strategies, is paying dearly for its own predatory practices when it was the ruthlessly dominant bookseller of the twentieth century, consumers will rally around it and its more helpless independent bookstore cousins. Publishing industry old-timers like to say “What goes around comes around” and for Amazon it has come around.  We hope however that Amazon Publishing will itself come around – to an open policy of mutual cooperation in the fragile ecology called publishing.

Details in Barnes & Noble Won’t Sell Books From Amazon Publishing

Richard Curtis

Stephen Roxburgh, founder of a small press called namelos llc., has written a guest editorial in Publishers Weekly defending Amazon.com against accusations of predatory behavior and thanking it for its support, without which namelos might not have survived.

Besides the obvious boost in e-book sales, Amazon’s POD program made a huge difference for this embryonic press. “Our new company publishes titles simultaneously in hardcover and paperback using print-on-demand technology, and e-books. Because our books are nonreturnable, most booksellers will not carry them. Amazon does.”

Though Amazon may not strike many as being in need of friends, Roxburgh feels the behemoth has been excessively vilified. “Not since Hester Prynne walked out of prison with an infant in her arms and ‘a rag of scarlet cloth’ in the shape of the letter A has there been such public hue and cry as Amazon has provoked in the past few weeks,” he declares. “From the point of view of this lunatic fringe publisher, Amazon, with all its glitches and stumbles, is crucial to our success. And I, for one, applaud the innovation and transformation Amazon has brought to the publishing world.”

Okay, that’s one. Anybody want to make it two?

We will. Without Amazon’s retail clout and marketing genius, E-Reads would still be in the dark ages of the 20th century (when it was founded).  We are also happy to shout out our other indispensable partners: BN.com, Ingram, LightningSource, Apple, Sony, Google, Kobo, Diesel, Content Reserve, Baker & Taylor and Fictionwise. In 2011 E-Reads sales exceed $1 million and we could not have done it without them.

For Roxburgh’s full editorial in PW, click here.

Richard Curtis

Google “biggest real estate deal of the year” and you won’t need to do an advanced search. Google now owns the vast building it has been renting for its 1800 New York City employees. How vast?  “At 2.9 million square feet, it has more space than the Empire State Building,” writes Charles V. Bagli of the New York Times, “and plenty of room for Google to grow.”

But as Google populates the space for its East Coast headquarters will it invite some tenants to find offices elsewhere?  Like e-book rival barnesandnoble.com? Among other tenants are Lifetime Entertainment, Nike USA and Deutsch advertising.

Details of the real estate deal in Google Signs Deal to Buy Manhattan Office Building

RC
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

An official Barnes & Noble, Inc. press release reports that the bookseller suffered its second holiday season decline in a row, with sales – $1.1 billion – down 5% over 2008 for the the period from November 1 2009 through January 2 2010. Michael Cader of Publisher’s Lunch reminds us that the firm’s holiday sales a year ago were off 7% over 2007, so the compounded declines were sufficient cause for concern to trigger a reduction in earnings projections.

That’s the bad news. The good is that BN.Com saw a 17% jump in sales from $114 million to $134 million. The hike was probably due to Nook sales which analysts place at at $10-20 million.

“We’re pleased we were able to ship all holiday orders for nook in time,” said Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble. “Orders for nook remained strong throughout the holiday season, and, in fact, accelerated after we announced that we had sold out our initial supply. Demand remains strong in the New Year and greater than our supply, however, we expect production to catch-up with demand and be fully stocked in our stores in the next few months.”

Pictured here is our kind of book nook.

RC

THE NOOK!

As in Book Nook.

As rumored, the E-Ink text is gray and white like the Kindle’s, but there is a color feature for the display of cover and other images. The $259 price matches the current price for the Kindle. The Nook will carry over 1 million titles, about half of which are currently not available on the Kindle.

The device does not appear to be manufactured by Plastic Logic as speculated on a number of blogs. So we still await the disclosure of the name of Plastic Logic’s reader scheduled for release in 2010. “The Nook” is taken, so Plastic Logic will have to dig deep into its pool of titles to come up with something more ingenious. Until it’s official, we’re calling it The Teasle.

A significant difference between Nook and Kindle is the Nook’s e-book-lending feature, details of which will be described in future postings.

Though the name and features of the device were not to be disclosed until later today at a press conference, the New York Times used a clever ploy to scoop most other journalists: it peeked at at an advertisement BN.Com will be running in the newspaper’s book review section next Sunday. The Times‘s own ombudsman Clark Hoyt, who writes a weekly column commenting on the ethical (or otherwise) conduct of its writers and executives, might have a few things to say about a newspaper that uses its own advertising department as a source of breaking news. Whether the name and nature of BN.Com’s device was embargoed until Sunday is not known. Still, there are some tricky ethical issues at play here.

Any comment, Mr. Hoyt?

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting - AND ADVERTISING! – performed by the New York Times.

A B&N spokesperson interviewed by a Mashable editor made it plain that the mystery announcement scheduled for October 20 was not only about an e-book reader but about the Plastic Logic e-book reader. This solves one mystery but poses several others: why did another B&N spokesperson say “We have made no announcement of an e-book reader device”? And where did the rumor arise that BN.Com was preparing to launch its own proprietary device?

In any event you can see the B&N guy confirming it’s Plastic Logic, though he did not, or perhaps was not allowed to, demonstrate the device. He did say it would have color, however, unlike a certain other e-book reader that he coyly would not name.

Nor did he mention the name of the Plastic Logic device, which in our frustration we have coined the Teasle. Can we hope that on October 20th B&N will at least announce the damn name?

RC

Anyone got any brainstorms for naming BN.Com’s proprietary e-book reader? We dubbed Plastic Logic’s no-namer the Teasle but we’re all out of ideas for the device that will be unveiled at what the press release calls “A Major Event in Our Company’s History”. It will take place at 4:15 PM on Tuesday October 20th at Pier Sixty at Chelsea Piers on Manhattan’s Hudson River waterfront.

Maybe call it USS United States to honor the great superliner launched a few docks south of Pier 60 back in 1952. Just don’t call it the Normandie, which burned and capsized at a 49th Street pier in 1942.

According to fairly well-informed speculation, BN’s wireless device will have a 6-inch touch screen and a virtual keyboard, and will be powered by Android. There is also a rumor that the device will enable downloaders to lend friends their e-books the way they lend them their book-books.

There are some mysteries revolving around the October 20 shindig. First and foremost is that Barnes & Noble completely denies that it’s launching its own e-reader. “We have made no announcement of an e-book reader device,” CNET’s Steven Musil quoted a senior public affairs officer. The spokeswoman pointed out that B&N is “already supporting a variety of e-book reader devices.”

Which leads to confusion #2. Ever since announcing its re-entry into e-books last summer BN.com has been making passes at several manufacturers, and even announced an exclusive alliance with the Plastic Logic. When that happened we wrote, “We’re not sure why anyone would want to close out any e-readers, especially Sony and Apple.” It now appears that the handshake with Plastic Logic was not so much an alliance as a dalliance.

One of the most interesting sources of speculation about the BN.com device revolves around that lending feature. Motoko Rich and Brad Stone of the New York Times report that “B.&N. has been talking to publishers about a new model, whereby users are granted a license to ‘lend’ an e-book to a friend. This could help the bookseller market the device to members of its book clubs program.”

Lending e-books is a great concept but it will have to be sold to publishers, who make no money on borrowed e-books. There is a way to lend e-books via libraries, but the process is tightly controlled and the number of lenders restricted. You can read more about e-book libraries here.

E-Reads will be Pier Sixty on October 20th, cocktail in one hand and cell phone in the other, and we’ll get our report to you as soon as the announcement is made. We think it’s about a new e-book device, but given B&N’s denials it could simply be that the company is hoping to tell us it expects to have a nice holiday season. That would indeed be “major event in our company’s history”, since last year around the same time B&N Chairman Len Riggio announced that the 2008 holiday was shaping up to be the worst he had seen in thirty years.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Arnaud Nourry, CEO of Hachette says that Amazon’s fixed $9.99 ceiling on the retail price of printed books, which seems to have been picked up by Google and BN.com, could doom hardcover publishing.

“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Nourry is quoted in an article by Ben Hall on the Financial Times website. Hachette owns US imprints Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing among many other worldwide publishing holdings.

Nourry’s comments come as the European Commission considers drafting rules and guidelines governing online business. “The changes would be aimed at allowing Internet users to access out-of-print works and so-called orphan works for which it is impossible or very difficult to trace the rights holders,” James Kanter of the New York Times quoted a European Union executive in charge of Internet matters. For details of the European plan see Europe Seeks to Ease Rules for Putting Books.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Financial Times and the New York Times.

Like tributaries flowing into a river, four events in the past week have come together to increase the depth and breadth of the e-book business. Each bears watching.

1. Discord over the Google Settlement as the September 4 deadline approaches. After Endeavor William Morris Agency voiced its opposition to the opt-in choice for its client-authors, a number of other opponents entered the fray. It will all come to a head at the end of next week.

2. Sony Debuts Wireless. According to Huffington Post, “Sony Corp. plans to offer an e-book reader with the ability to wirelessly download books, injecting more competition in a small but fast-growing market by adopting a key feature of the rival Kindle from Amazon.com.”
In December Sony will release the device with a price tag of $399. It features a touch screen and will carry books and newspapers via AT&T’s cellular network.

Buried in the story is a Sony announcement that you’ll be able to “borrow” ebooks from libraries and view them on their eReader. That appears to be a feature that other device makers have or have even given much thought to. A system like it has been in use at a number of colleges. After a fixed period of time (in Sony’s case, 21 days) the loan expires and your e-book vaporizes.

3. Barnes & Noble Teams with IREX to offer New Digital Reader. Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly writes that “Barnes & Noble stepped up its efforts to compete with Amazon and the Kindle, announcing plans to partner with Netherlands-based IREX Technologies to offer a new wireless-enabled digital reading device with access to the 700,000 e-book titles available through the newly launched B&N eBookstore.” iRex is a Dutch reading device that has gained some traction in Europe. We hailed it as a Kindle killer a while back, though contenders developed since then are bidding for that title.

One of them is the forthcoming unnamed Plastic Logic reader (we have nicknamed it Teasle until the manufacturer announces the official monicker). And speaking of that, we hope BN.Com will unconfuse us about something. We had the impression that BN had cast its lot exclusively with Plastic Logic. But now it’s announced this relationship with iRex. Can someone out there clarify?

And as for Kindle killers, we’re calling a moratorium on such declarations until Gen Next of e-reading hardware makes itself known. And we’re definitely withholding our blessing until we can read on a full-color screen.

4. Amazon Kindle to launch in Europe next week? Stuff.TV asks whether Kindle is Europe-bound.

The Kindle has proved popular with bookworms in the States, but has failed to launch over here due to licensing issues, leaving British ereaders with a choice between the Sony Reader and the Cool-ER to quench their ebook thirst. However, none of these current offerings have been able to offer the Wi-fi capabilities that is the Kindle’s killer feature, enabling wireless downloads of books and delivery of electronic versions of newspapers and magazines direct to the device. It could be that Amazon is hoping to get the Kindle over here as quickly as possible in order to win over the market before the launch of Sony’s Daily Edition, announced in the States yesterday.

We’ll update you as these four news items unfold.

RC

Last month, we completely lost our patience waiting for Plastic Logic to reveal the name of the e-book reader it will be launching next year. “I don’t think the company’s directors realize how frustrating it is for us to refer to the surname but not the given name.” we wrote. “Our frustration has reached the tipping point. We don’t want to wait any more.” So, we invited readers to make up their own name and offered an award for the one we liked the most.

Today we have a winner. Chris Christoffersen (no relation that we’re aware of to the singer-actor, who spells his name Kris Kristofferson) coined the word “Teasle,” a truly creative blend of “Kindle” and “Tease.” Perhaps Plastic Logic hasn’t meant to tease us. Perhaps it truly hasn’t come up with a name. That’s fine. Until they do, we’re calling it The Teasle.

The naming of the gadget is no small matter. Barnes & Noble will be partnering with Plastic Logic to carry its e-books on the newly launched BN.com retail site. So it would be nice, to say the least, if the manufacturers could give BN.com a name to refer to. Meanwhile, for whatever it’s worth, a teasel (note the spelling) is an herbaceous plant. Some teasels have medicinal properties. Others, we are reliably informed, are pests.

If Plastic Logic adopts “Teasle” we expect a fat tip.

Richard Curtis