Take a look at the chart behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on stage at the launch of the big-screen Amazon Kindle DX last week. Bezos revealed that, where Kindle editions are available alongside paper editions of books, the  Kindle sales are running at 35% of book sales. What’s more, as the chart shows, there’s been [...]

[Read more →]

If this Ars Technica story is correct, reporting on a National Business Review claim, New Zealand is about to see a wholesale review of its copyright legislation. The NBR story, which appeared last Friday, claimed that the National government has put a freeze on any more patch-ups to the existing law and is now planning [...]

[Read more →]

The NZ$100 million upgrade to New Zealand’s National Library building has prompted debate about whether it’s money well spent. The latest contribution to this debate from the New Zealand Herald’s Brian Rudman suggests that the money would be better spent digitising the library’s collection so it’s available to everyone, not just tourists and residents of [...]

[Read more →]

At last week’s Digital Publishing seminars, we touched on the topic of how to price an ebook. There are many ways you can arrive at a price. It’s a really important issue, affecting the publisher’s profitablility, the author’s livelihood, and the consumer’s willingness to get on board with ebooks. So I was interested to read [...]

[Read more →]

US publisher Simon and Schuster has announced that its ebook royalties will shift to a payment based on percentage of net receipts rather than a share of the list price. Like Random House, who made this move last October, S&S will pay authors 25% of net receipts. While some might see this as a backward [...]

[Read more →]