LISNews: Librarian News

Amazon’s markup of digital delivery to indie authors is ~129,000%

This post is about the where the sales of the book are coming from, and why Amazon takes 48% of digital book sales. Surprising eh? I thought Amazon was the BEST for indie authors, right? We will get into that later.

The book had a great launch, even getting to the #1 Hot Releases spot for Amazon.com for the travel section.

The Greatest Threat to Amazon May Just Be Libraries
Instead of turning the members of its community away for an eBook that is already borrowed, the library is ideally situated to sell them the eBook they wished to read, right when they wished to read it. There is nothing stopping a library from becoming an eBookseller. This capability is available from all of the major library solution suppliers who are equally well versed in eBook technologies and the publisher-required DRM necessary for them to be sold directly to consumers.

After the online takedown over "After Friday Night Lights"
Then, suddenly, as of last Tuesday, it wasn't on Amazon anymore. Byliner had removed it. The company said in a statement that it would repost After Friday Night Lights on Tuesday at the original $2.99.

Why did it get taken down in the first place? Why did it lose a precious week aboard Amazon, the world's biggest e-books store?

Because the big dogs are scrapping over the e-book market. Amazon is the biggest seller in that market. Apple is massive, too, but wants to be bigger; it's long been upset with the way Amazon discounts prices on e-books (see below).

Amazon CloudSearch (beta)
Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed search service in the cloud that allows customers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, developers simply create a search domain, upload the data they want to make searchable to Amazon CloudSearch, and the service then automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys a highly tuned search index.

Amazon CloudSearch seamlessly scales as the amount of searchable data increases or as the query rate changes, and developers can change search parameters, fine tune search relevance, and apply new settings at any time without having to upload the data again.

Amazon CloudSearch enables customers to offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a search platform. Customers don't have to worry about hardware provisioning, data partitioning, or software patches. Amazon CloudSearch offers low, pay-as-you-go pricing with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments.