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...
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Category: DeBunking
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Breaking News: Amazon Is NOT Going to Suffer From the Shifting eBook Market
It is a given, in 2017, that many sites are going to report on "declining" ebook sales. It is also given that almost all of those sites are going...
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On eBooks Being a Dead Format
Have you ever had one of those moments where you kinda sorta agree with someone's conclusion and yet still disagree with many of the assumptions that lead to the...
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Stop Blaming Amazon for the Actions of Consumers
It is always fashionable to hate the winner. In 2017, in bookselling, that is Amazon. I was reminded of that truism this week when I read a piece on...
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