“Only the title of the winning candidate’s wife will be published in paper” is a line in an article in the WSJ titled “Amazon Scores Exclusive E-Book Deal”.
Amazon.com Inc. struck a deal with a midsize publisher to offer separate biographies of the two potential first ladies on an exclusive basis to users of Amazon’s Kindle electronic-book reader.
The two titles, “Cindy McCain: Elegance, Good Will and Hope for a New America,” by Alicia Colon, and “Michelle Obama: Grace and Intelligence in a Time of Change,” by Elizabeth Lightfoot, are being published as e-books by Lyons Press, an imprint owned by Morris Communications Co.’s Globe Pequot Press publishing unit, based in Guilford, Conn.
Only the title of the winning candidate’s wife will be published as a traditional, $14.95 paperback.
An academic library or public library that has a patron that wants to read or cite the biography of the losing candidates wife will only be able to get the book on the Kindle. This limited availability of certain texts is going to raise issues for libraries. What additional problems or issues do you foresee?
and booksellers too will be dismayed
Publishers Weekly reports that Jane Jacobs, of Porter Square Books in Cambridge MA said she ordered paperback editions of both books, and was informed that the one shipped after the election would be that of the winning candidate’s wife. “That was a strange enough decision in itself,” she said. “But I made it and ordered 12 each.” Now that she knows Amazon will sell both books as Kindle e-books two months before she would have one of them in her store, she has cancelled her order.
Welcome to the strange world of publishing in the year 2008.
Amazon = the Wal-Mart of booksellers?
Is it just me or is Amazon starting to become the Wal-Mart of booksellers?
don’t care
…so people think this is the first time this has happened? why should publishers print books about losers? all this proves is that neither biography is worth reading, probably just texts mostly strung together from other sources like some People magazine biography.
it’s like any publisher prepping two books for the Super Bowl or World Series, the winner gets the full treatment and rushed to print. except in that case, sports fans might still want to read about the loser.
but really, a book about “the spouse of the person who didn’t become President”? who wants to read that?
I wonder if
the rights to the ‘loser’s’ book will become available as Lyon Press won’t be using them?