By Ken Doctor Here’s how newspapers sell what they do to would-be readers. You can get the whole paper, now sometimes including digital access. We’ll sell you Sunday only, or the weekend, or 7-day, but you have to take our whole paper. That’s what we sell; that’s our one-size-fits-all product. It fit your grandparents and your parents, [...]

By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG Last October, suspense writer Jonathon King launched “Midnight Guardians,” the sixth novel in his Max Freeman crime series. Unlike the previous five titles, this one didn’t have a major publisher or a cash advance. Instead, “Midnight Guardians,” available at Amazon.com for $14.99 as a digital text and $23.08 as a print-on-demand paperback, [...]

By CHARLES FORELLE BRUSSELS—European Union antitrust authorities raided several publishers in Europe Tuesday, searching for evidence that they had acted illegally to keep prices high in the nascent electronic-book market. The EU’s interest dovetails with ongoing investigations by authorities in the U.K., California and Texas into the arrangements that publishers make to sell digital books…more  

Welcome to disruption. 26-year old Amanda Hocking is the best-selling “indie” writer on the Kindle store, meaning she doesn’t have a publishing deal, Novelr says…more

By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT Published: November 13, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO — Google and groups representing book publishers and authors filed a modified version of their controversial books settlement with a federal court on Friday. The changes would pave the way for other companies to license Google’s vast digital collection of copyrighted out-of-print books, and might resolve [...]

14.10.09 Catherine Neilan Google is poised to launch its “buy anywhere, read anywhere” digital books programme Google Editions simultaneously in the US, UK and Europe within the first half of next year. Speaking at the Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt, Amanda Edmonds, Google’s director of strategic partnerships, said the programme would be rolled out [...]

(International Herald Tribune) By Brad Stone Published: March 19, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO: Aiming to outdo Amazon.com and recapture the crown for the most digital titles in an e-book library, Sony is announcing Thursday a deal with Google to make a half million copyright-free books available for its Reader device, a rival to the Amazon Kindle. [...]

On TechCrunch by Jason Kincaid on March 17, 2009 Online document sharing site Scribd has announced that it has partnered with a number of major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications, to legally offer some of their content to Scribd’s community free of charge. Publishers have begun to add [...]

(New York Times) I don’t mean to turn this column into All E-Books, All the Time. But Amazon pulled a nice one-two P.R. punch. Two weeks ago, it released its Kindle 2 electronic book reader, and announced that its catalog of electronic books had hit 240,000 titles. You can download them wirelessly to the Kindle, [...]