This Is Not Going to Go Over Well (But Will Help Me Teach My Class Today)
So, this morning, Amazon announced something called Amazon Source, a program to sell Kindles through participating independent booksellers. Yes, seriously. No, really, this isn’t one of my weird jokes. We created Amazon Source to empower independent bookstores and other small retailers to sell Kindle e-readers and ...
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MatchBook is NOT a Dating Service for Readers
Amazon made a couple of announcements yesterday that, as Amazon announcements tend to do, set the book world atwitter. They announced the next version of the Kindle, but the news that really generated the headlines was the announcement of “MatchBook.”1 Amazon has unveiled a new US initiative to bundle print ...
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Fifty Shades of Grey
So, this past weekend, Salon ran this article about Amazon’s “$1 million secret”—their recently created giving program, which has benefitted a large number of literary nonprofits.. Key word there being “nonprofit,” but I’ll get to that in a minute . . . On the whole, the article is ...
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[Redacted]
E.J. and Nate have censored this post for reasons that are probably obvious. I swore to myself that I would never write about Amazon, pricing, price checking, and the suckery of NPR ever again, but then of course, NPR has to go and run this insipidly stupid piece about a “predatory” Amazon. I’m ...
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Farhad Manjoo, Amazon, and Independent Bookstores [Controversies]
Following on my post from yesterday, which was following on Richard Russo’s op-ed piece, which was following on Amazon’s “Price Check special,” today Slate’s tech guy, Farhad Manjoo, has his own piece about Amazon and indie bookstores—one that has seemingly pissed off everyone I know. If ...
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Richard Russo, Bookstores, and this Amazon Price Check Thing [Controversies]
We talked about this very briefly on last week’s podcast, but now that Richard Russo has written an op-ed piece for the NY Times, I feel like it’s worth exploring this Amazon Price Check controversy in a bit more detail. First off, for anyone not familiar with this recent Amazon vs. Indie Bookstore kerfuffle, ...
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Amazon's Table: Just Like the Kindle, Only Bigger and With Less Books Stuff
I’ll be interested to see what Amazon’s table is all about when it comes out, but I have to admit, as someone who still reads and actually likes books, I’m a bit wary . . . The New York Times has an interesting piece about this that highlights the contradictions surrounding this device. On the one ...
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