The following article was published in the latest Australian Booksellers Association magazine. I wrote it a couple of months ago and some of the UK moves have been affected by the change of government. (The Digital Economy Act 2010 passed by the previous government did include Section 43 which amends copyright for some public library [...]

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Top six US publisher Simon and Schuster, a division of CBS, broke out its digital numbers from its first quarter results to show an impressive year-on-year growth of 233% to US$12 million, up from just US$3.6M in Q1 2009 .  The figure includes ebooks, audio downloads and standalone apps. While these numbers are still small [...]

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Just a day after opening its Kindle store to non-US publishers, Amazon has responded to emerging competitive pressures and cut its slice of Kindle sales income from 70% to 30%, meaning publishers and authors using its self-service Digital Text Platform will now get the lion’s share of the sale. There are hooks. The old 30% [...]

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If you’ve been “lucky” enough to hear one of my presentations recently, you’ll quite likely have heard me plugging Smashwords.com as a great way to dip a toe in the ebook waters with no cost, virtually no pain and very author- and publisher-friendly terms. So it was good to hear this piece of news from [...]

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A notice from the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) highlights a problem that will affect most non-US authors and publishers if the proposed Google Books Settlement is ratified by a US court later this year. “Unless New Zealand authors or publishers formally opt out of the settlement, or formally opt in but request Google [...]

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