Amazon is opening a physical bookstore that has one key difference from traditional shops by Max Slater-Robins

Amazon

Amazon on Tuesday is opening a physical store in Seattle called "Amazon Books," the first real-world bookstore for the company, which has operated online since 1994.

The store will include both books and Amazon products, such as the Kindle, Echo, and Fire TV, the company said on its website.

The company will use information it has gathered from its online store, such as customer ratings, to help select titles in its physical store.

"We're taking the data we have and we're creating physical places with it," Jennifer Cast, vice president of Amazon Books, told The Seattle Times.

Each book will also include a placard showing its Amazon.com rating and customer reviews,according to The Verge.

Here's how those reviews will be displayed alongside the physical book:

Amazon

Read more....

The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead By ALEXANDRA ALTER SEPT. 22, 2015

Penguin Random House last year doubled the size of its distribution center in Crawfordsville, Ind., to speed up book distribution. CreditA J Mast for The New York Times

Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.

As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business.

Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were realized when Borders declared bankruptcy.

“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”

Read more....

E-book sales decline: Do people not want to read books on tablets?

Why Don't People Want to Read E-books on Tablets?

By Robert Rosenberger

 | 

Posted Thursday, Aug. 15, 2013, at 11:38 AM

Jeff Bezos shows off a new Kindle Fire.
Photo by JOE KLAMAR/AFP/GettyImages

We’ve been living through an e-book boomtime. Two years ago, Amazon turned heads by announcing that sales of digital books had eclipsed those of hardcovers, and the trend has only continued. But a recent pair of reports shows that a plateau may be coming. The Association of American Publishers claims that this year’s first quarter saw only a 5 percent increase in e-book sales, which is strikingly low compared with previous quarters. Nielsen reports that e-book sales actually fell in April, if only slightly, compared with same period last year. This is significant because it marks the first-ever decline in the market. If the current numbers hold, then e-books will maintain 25 percent of the overall book market.

Nicholas Carr reflects on these data on his Rough Type blog, and he brainstorms a list of potential culprits. His suggestions include the possibility that we’ve run out of readers willing to make the jump from print to e-reading; that readers are no longer purchasing e-books simply for novelty’s sake; and that the e-book format may be proving conducive only to limited kinds of reading, such as travel reading.* Read more...

Is the book a crucial cultural artifact, or just an outdated container for content? — paidContent

Is the book a crucial cultural artifact, or just an outdated container for content? — paidContent

By Mathew Ingram
 

Jan. 18, 2013 - 6:36 PM EST

photo: Flickr user Marcus Hansso

 Summary:
A blog post by Nick Carr about the future of the printed book touched off an epic comment debate between the author and media theorist Clay Shirky about whether the book format itself will die out and be replaced.

If you’ve been following our coverage of the disruption of the publishing industry, you know that the meaning of the term “book” has become pretty fluid, thanks to the e-book revolution; and it’s not just the Kindle, but new offerings like Byliner and Atavist, which blur the lines between books and magazines, and even new variations on an old format like serialized fiction. So do physical books really matter any more? Is there something special about them, or are they just a historical artifact whose time has come and gone? Read more....

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Txtr beagle e-reader - review | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Txtr beagle e-reader - review | Technology | guardian.co.uk

• Michael Grothaus
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 8 November 2012 08.49 EST

An e-reader available next year is small, light and costs just £8 - we look at how a prototype measures up against the Kindle

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Amazon UK Wipes Woman's Kindle Library, Won't Say Why

Amazon UK Wipes Woman's Kindle Library, Won't Say Why

By Brian Chacos 

Amazon's offer to store your downloaded Kindle e-books in the cloud seems outstanding, especially given the eReader's scant 2GB of onboard storage. A tale making the rounds today highlights the dangers of leaving your data completely in third-party hands, however, after a Norwegian woman had her Amazon.co.uk account erased and all her Kindle e-books wiped without warning -- or explanation. Read more...

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Children say going to the library encourages them to read more | Reading Agency

Children say going to the library encourages them to read more | Reading Agency

Parents who want to encourage their children to read more will be relieved to hear that it needn't cost them a penny.

In a Reading Agency survey of 1,110 children aged 4 -11 over a fifth (22%) selected visiting the library as the action most likely to make them want to read, compared to less than 2% saying that reading a book on an iPad or Kindle was the thing most likely to make them want to read. Only one in ten said that buying a book would be most likely to get them reading.

Read more...

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A Guide to Electronic Books - NYTimes.com

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NO SHELVES NEEDED From far left, the Amazon Kindle DX, the Kobo Vox tablet, the Nook Color and the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

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Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more

Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more

Dear Customers,
Today we're announcing a new benefit for Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership: the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.
Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free, including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers — as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. No other e-reader or ebook store offers such a service.
Image via Wikipedia

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The New York Public Library’s eBooks Now Readable on Kindles and via Kindle apps « Islandlibrarian's Blog

Cover via Amazon  The New York Public Library’s eBooks Now Readable on Kindles and via Kindle apps « Islandlibrarian's Blog

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