Rubrica semanal de notícias e artigos relacionados com a edição de livros digitais.
In the age of rapid digital revolution in publishing, when readers have book review options ranging from decades-old publications like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review, to Twitter book clubs, literary websites, online publications like this one, and Amazon reader reviews, what is the role of the book reviewer? And how has that role changed?
It is definitely no longer a secret that Amazon(NASDAQ:AMZN) is working on a Kindle Tablet. It hasn’t been for a good long while now. While Amazon has not officially come out and confirmed or given any details on what we can expect, little by little details are leaking out and causing talk.
Curatorship and discoverability -– these were the buzz terms at the UK’s Book Industry Conference (BIC) which opened on Monday in King’s Cross, London. Speakers representing independent shops on both sides of the Atlantic emphasized how good bricks and mortar bookshops are at “curating” a vibrant stock perfectly tailored to their community, while both said that one of the key ways in which physical bookshops can win in the battle against the online giants is in their ability to act as a huge shop window. Put simply, more books are discovered in bookshops than they are on Amazon.
Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperbacks and hardbacks combined, with its UK business shifting twice as many e-books as hardbacks, it has announced today.
Gordon Willoughby, the European director for Kindle, called the UK rate of Kindle purchases “truly astonishing” considering the company has been selling hardbacks for 13 years, and Kindle books for nine months. Since 1st April 2011, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.co.uk has sold, it has sold 242 Kindle books. The figure excludes free Kindle books but includes hardcover sales even if there is no equivalent Kindle edition.
Waterstone’s parent company HMV announced this morning that it would sell the UK book chain to Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut’s company, A&NN Capital Fund Management, for GBP 53 million.
In a surprising move, The Bookseller reports that Waterstone’s current Managing Director Dominic Myers will be replaced by James Daunt to run the bookstore chain after the deal is completed. Myers will take on another role within HMV.
When Amazon talks about how ebooks are selling in relation to print books, as they did again this week, they are comparing apples to apples. They are comparing what their customers bought in digital form versus what they bought in print in any given period of time.
When PW or the AAP or even the publishers themselves talk about how the industry is doing selling ebooks in relation to print books, they are usually comparing apples to oranges. They are comparing what actual consumers bought from retailers in digital form with what retailers and wholesalers bought from publishers in print form for any period of time. So they are comparing ebooks that consumers actually bought now with print books that consumers might, or might not, buy later.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to a first-time author. A self-published book is almost certainly going to end up on the digital slush pile, with fewer readers than the average blog post. But for a writer like me, which is to say, most working writers — midcareer, midlist, middle-aged, more or less middlebrow, and somewhat Internet savvy — self-publishing seems to make a lot of sense at this point. Early in my career, because of some lucky breaks and a kinder economy, I was able to get advances that helped me support my family over the months it took to write a book. I haven’t been a huge best seller, and I’ve never seen a residual check except for an independently published book of crime stories that I edited, and that was only because I got nothing up front. But I’ve built a modest audience and a name. Now that the advances are smaller and the technology is available, why not start appealing directly to those readers?
New York Times E-Book Best Sellers
These lists are an expanded version of those appearing in the May 29, 2011 print edition of the Book Review, reflecting sales for the week ending May 14, 2011.
1. WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, by Sara Gruen
2. BURIED PREY, by John Sandford
3. SOMETHING BORROWED, by Emily Giffin
4. 10TH ANNIVERSARY, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
5. DEAD RECKONING, by Charlaine Harris
1. BOSSYPANTS, by Tina Fey
2. HEAVEN IS FOR REAL, by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent
3. IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS, by Erik Larson
4. LIES THAT CHELSEA HANDLER TOLD ME, by Chelsea Handler, Glen Handler, Roy Handler and others
5. SEAL TEAM SIX, by Howard E. Wasdin and Stephen Templin
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