I keep a close and interested eye on the world of ebooks, and I'm pleased to report that it keeps getting weirder. British supermarket chain Sainsbury - who I worked for once, helping to program a new payroll system for a few months, until they scrapped the whole project - recently bought HMV's share in ebook hub Anobii for a whopping, er, one pound. (Americans: that's about $1.50.) Huh? Meanwhile, HarperCollins announced its "HarperCollins 360" global publishing program, which at first I thought was them taking a page from the music industry's post-Napster '360 deals' -- but no; on sober second thought it has nothing to do with those except for name. Instead it's an attempt to make all of their English-language books available to all English-language readers. I know, I know: they're only doing this now? Just as ebook revenue exceeds that of hardcovers? Ah, publishing. Meanwhiler, Startup Weekend founder and semi-vagabond Andrew Hyde Kickstartered, wrote, and self-published a travel book called "This Book Is About Travel," and then discovered that Amazon was marking up its digital delivery fees to the tune of an estimated 129,000%. Nice margin if you can get it. But for the rest of us, well, not so much. Here are some cold hard numbers from Amazon for yours truly, for the first half of this month:
Sunday 17 June 2012
Notes From The Ebook Trenches
I keep a close and interested eye on the world of ebooks, and I'm pleased to report that it keeps getting weirder. British supermarket chain Sainsbury - who I worked for once, helping to program a new payroll system for a few months, until they scrapped the whole project - recently bought HMV's share in ebook hub Anobii for a whopping, er, one pound. (Americans: that's about $1.50.) Huh? Meanwhile, HarperCollins announced its "HarperCollins 360" global publishing program, which at first I thought was them taking a page from the music industry's post-Napster '360 deals' -- but no; on sober second thought it has nothing to do with those except for name. Instead it's an attempt to make all of their English-language books available to all English-language readers. I know, I know: they're only doing this now? Just as ebook revenue exceeds that of hardcovers? Ah, publishing. Meanwhiler, Startup Weekend founder and semi-vagabond Andrew Hyde Kickstartered, wrote, and self-published a travel book called "This Book Is About Travel," and then discovered that Amazon was marking up its digital delivery fees to the tune of an estimated 129,000%. Nice margin if you can get it. But for the rest of us, well, not so much. Here are some cold hard numbers from Amazon for yours truly, for the first half of this month:
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