Good Books » Book Readers

Attorney General Investigates Potentially Anticompetitive E-Book Deals with Amazon and Apple

admin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:07:00 +0000

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is investigating agreements between the country’s largest e-book publishers and two of the largest sellers – Amazon.com, Inc. and Apple, Inc. — that may block competitors from offering cheaper e-book prices.

Both Amazon and Apple have reached agreements with the largest e-book publishers that ensure both will receive the best prices for e-books over any competitors — contract provisions known as “most favored nation” ( MFN ) clauses.

In letters to Amazon.Com and Apple, Blumenthal is calling on the companies to meet with his office to address these concerns. Publishers that have reached such agreements with Amazon and Apple include Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Penguin.

These agreements appear to deter certain publishers from offering discounts to Amazon and Apple’s competitors — because they must offer the same to Amazon and Apple. This restriction blocks cheaper and competitive prices for consumers.

After a preliminary review, Blumenthal’s office has already found that e-book prices offered by Amazon, Apple, Borders and Barnes & Noble for several New York Times Bestseller books were identical among all four sellers.

“These agreements among publishers, Amazon and Apple appear to have already resulted in uniform prices for many of the most popular e-books — potentially depriving consumers of competitive prices,” Blumenthal said. “The e-book market is set to explode — with analysts predicting that e-book readers will be among the holiday season’s biggest electronic gifts — warranting prompt review of the potential anti-consumer impacts.

“Amazon and Apple combined will likely command the greatest share of the retail e-book market, allowing their most-favored-nation clauses to effectively set the floor prices for the most popular e-books. Such agreements — especially when offered to two of the largest e-book retail competitors in the United States — threaten to encourage coordinated pricing and discourage discounting.”

Copyright © 2009 Good Books

Attorney General Investigates Potentially Anticompetitive E-Book Deals with Amazon and Apple

Writing an E-Book to Make Money by Lance Winslow

admin — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 13:50:00 +0000

Indeed, just about every American has at one time considered writing a book about something. Obviously, there are millions of books published, and you can tell just by going to your local library, or going to one of the large bookstores. There are books everywhere, and even in the future as electronic books become more popular and e-book readers become the way of the future, there will still be plenty of people who will want to have their say and put their thoughts into words.

Then, there are folks that don’t really care much or have a passion for what they write about, rather they are writing books to make money. They realize that perhaps they don’t have the literary background to secure a publisher to create a real book, nor do they have time to chase down the fewer and fewer remaining publishers to help them produce their work.

They’d rather create a book using electronic methods, using the word processing tools on their computer. Not long ago, an acquaintance of mine from Australia said she wanted to write an e-book, and she needed to finish it fast and start selling it within the coming months, because she didn’t want to lose her home, and this was her idea to make money.

Not to crush anyone’s dream, but writing an e-book to make money and then selling it online, may not be the way to go, most people don’t make very much money selling e-books, if you don’t have the passion; it is less likely to make any money.

Therefore, I told her; “Why don’t you get a job? I do not see how you are going to make money with this eBook you are creating. I mean have you made any money doing this eBook Marketing at all? It doesn’t make any sense to me, I mostly see a bunch of scam artists out there promising the world trying to con suckers into buying garbage eBooks. Why would you wish to be anywhere near them?”

Perhaps, my advice to you is that if you create an eBook then needs to be something of value. What I find is far too many people are creating e-books that are less than 10,000 words, hardly a book, and then selling them for $39.95 online telling other people how to create and sell e-books or how to market on the Internet to unsuspecting customers.

Personally, I am alarmed at the number of people who write e-books to sell to article marketers and other Internet marketers, because in a way they are enabling them, and a good many of the marketers online are not ethical. And although a few are legitimate, I am quite certain, these e-book writers do not seem to be worried that they will be assisting less-than-ethicals who are selling fraudulent stuff online. Please consider all this.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes inn ethical writing, eBooks included.

Review – The Temptation of the Impossible

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:35:00 +0000

The Temptation of the Impossible:

Victor Hugo and Les Misérables

Mario Vargas Llosa

John King, translator

Princeton University Press

232 pages

Hardcover $24.95

978-0-691-13111-5

Here, in this compelling book, readers can enjoy the fascinating encounter between two literary giants: Mario Vargas Llosa and Victor Hugo. Intriguing and entertaining in its approach—part literary criticism, part biography, and part personal essay—The Temptation of the Impossible is Vargas Llosa’s consistently perceptive tribute to Hugo’s Les Misérables. For Vargas Llosa—Peruvian novelist, journalist, and literary critic—Hugo’s 1862 novel is a brilliant if not always flawlessly executed portrayal of “a world blazing with extreme misfortune, love, courage, happiness, and vile deeds.”

Hugo’s development of characters and themes are central to Vargas Llosa’s analysis, but for the Peruvian critic it is Hugo’s narrative style that remains essential to appreciating the novel. The narrator, says Vargas Llosa, is most remarkable for his “omniscience, omnipotence, exuberance, visibility, and egomania. He knows everything that happens during the time of the novel, those eighteen years that begin on an October evening in 1815, when the ex-convict Jean Valjean enters the inhospitable town of Digne, and end that night in 1833 when Jean Valjean dies in his small house in the Rue de L’Homme Armé, with Marius and Cosette by his bedside, in the glow of Bishop Myriel’s candlesticks.”

Vargas Llosa boldly though not wholly persuasively argues that a great novel—especially Hugo’s gargantuan tale of Valjean, Cosette, Marius, Javert, and the other characters—can make “us feel dissatisfied with what exists, and gives us an appetite for unreality that can influence our lives in many different ways and affect the wider world.” Many literary critics will disagree that novels function as catalysts for changing an individual (much less the world), yet Vargas Llosa argues so passionately that even dissenting critics will admire his zealous and thorough reasoning.

Hugo’s novel, while extraordinarily popular in the nineteenth century, unfortunately attracts few contemporary readers. It is perhaps too long and discursive. Many potential readers, in fact, are more familiar with the spectacular musical than with Hugo’s book; the Schönberg-Boublil box-office phenomenon opened in September 1980 in Paris for an eight-week season and has shown little signs of fading from the limelight. Nevertheless, for any student of world literature who is interested in an important and hugely readable, one-stop critical analysis of Hugo’s canonical novel, Vargas Llosa’s fascinating book is the perfect destination for an evening or two. Readers may not be persuaded of the greatness of Les Misérables, but they will be entertained and edified by Vargas Llosa’s infectious enthusiasm.

Chicago Writer Bryan Alaspa Releases Free Novel for eBook Fans

admin — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:38:00 +0000

Chicago native and author Bryan W. Alaspa has been a proponent of electronic books from the start of his professional career. With the advent and increased popularity of e-Book readers such as Kindle and the Sony reader and the increased proliferation of smartphones and other devices that allow for e-Book reading, he had decided to release a novel, for free, for those using such devices. The novel, titled “Gone,” will only be available via download at the website www.feedbooks.com.

“I have found that e-Book publishers have been the most receptive to my work from the beginning,” said Mr. Alaspa. “I have been a fan of e-Books for a long time and I am just glad to see that they are finally starting to catch on in the mainstream. It just means that fans of reading can carry an entire library with them instead of having to lug around hundreds of books. So, as a treat for those who have embraced this medium as much as I have, I wanted to make this available to them and available to them for free.”

Feedbooks.com makes their books available for download for all of the available e-Book readers, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle. However, it also uses the epub format that makes the downloads available for smartphones such as the iPhone and the G1.
“I just recently joined the smartphone crowd with the purchase of a G1 phone,” adds Mr. Alaspa. “I was giddy to find out I could download hundreds of books on a device I could hold in one hand. So, I had to make one of my books available for others who were like me.”

“Gone” is a horror novel written by Mr. Alaspa about a year ago. It tells the terrifying tale of a group of friends who work at a company and are on a weekend retreat. When the group wakes up in the morning to find one of their number is missing, the terror begins. This is the second work of horror that Mr. Alaspa has written, with “Rig” being the first and that was released in print in 2008.

Those interested in the book can visit the website www.feedbooks.com. They can download the books there or download them using apps available for smartphones such as the iPhone or G1.