Trademark bullying is a pox on industries ranging from breweries to whatever over-priced junk Monster Cable is making this week. A trademark bully's ostensible goal is to keep consumers...
Continue reading
Category: DeBunking
Amazon to Spend a Billion Dollars to License “The Three-Body Problem”?
The Three-Body Problem is one of those books that many people have heard of but few have read. Originally published in Chinese, the English translation of this SF novel...
Continue reading
Major UK Booksellers Throw Up Their Hands When Accused of Selling Far-Right Titles
Remember last year when everyone wrung their hands over Amazon selling Holocaust denial books and completely ignored the fact that you could find those same books in just about...
Continue reading
If eReaders Are Dead Then So Are Film Cameras. And Horse Riding. And Fountain Pens. And Digital Cameras. And Lots of Other Stuff
Last week Tom's Hardware published a piece which used flawed assumptions to ask whether the ereader was dead: Yes, reading now is a little bit different than it was...
Continue reading
Updated: eBooks are a Stupid Product, and Other Blinkered Ramblings
Lagardère Publishing CEO Arnaud Nourry gave an interview to Scroll.in this weekend that showed both that he was remarkably ignorant about his products as well as how and why consumers...
Continue reading
Edmonton Airport Wastes Money on a Short Story Printer
So the latest hot and trendy bookish gimmick is a receipt printer that has been gussied up as a "vending machine" that prints short stories. This fad is the...
Continue reading
No One Wants to Buy LitFic Anymore, So a UK Arts Council is Going to Waste Taxpayer Funds On It
A new report from the Arts Council England has confirmed what everyone already knew: people aren't buying nearly as much literary fiction as before. Don't ask me why, but...
Continue reading
No One Knows Exactly How Many eBooks Indie Authors Published Last Year, Much Less ISBNs
In our next trip behind the publishing industry curtain, we are going to take a look at Bowker's annual report on ISBN registrations and discuss how everyone is still...
Continue reading
The Publishing Industry Thinks Facebook and Netflix Are Doomed
The legacy publishing industry keeps bleating about "screen fatigue" as the cause of why people are buying fewer of their ebooks (because it could not possibly be that Big...
Continue reading
Lies, Damn Lies, and Book People Statistics
When Mark Twain popularized the phrase "lies, damn lies, and statistics", he was referring to the way that one can selectively report statistics and tell just about any narrative...
Continue reading
Children Turn Their Backs on eBooks as ‘Screen Fatigue’ Takes Hold, And Other Fictions
As I am sure many people know, The Guardian takes every opportunity - and sometimes invents those opportunities - to proclaim that ebooks are dying and print books are...
Continue reading
Correcting the Record – Amazon’s Naggar Tells Publishers to Slash eBook Prices … to Help Unknown Authors
There's a story going around this week that the Amazon VP of Kindle Content, David Naggar, advised publishers to slash their ebook prices to boost sales. The story, as...
Continue reading
No, Amazon ISN’T Teasing Alexa on Kindles
The usual disreputable source is making stuff up again. In the past they've claimed that sources told them that Amazon would release a Kindle with a Liquavista screen (an...
Continue reading
Wild-A** Guess Says Amazon.com Book Sales up 46%, eBook Sales Up 6% in 2017
There's a new "report" going around which says Amazon's ebook sales grew by 6% last year, but it isn't even worth the electrons required to store the webpage it's...
Continue reading
Self-Centered Bookseller Demands Amazon Subsidize Indie Bookstores
An entitled book buyer at Vroman's Bookstore has responded to Jeff Bezos' asking for philanthropy ideas with a greedily outstretched hand. From the LATimes: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the...
Continue reading