E-Commerce Blog

Fewer than one in five U.S. consumers are willing to pay for access to their favorite news site, according to a report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Only about one-third of Americans even have a single favorite site, the 2010 State of the News Media report found, though the majority don’t roam far: 57 percent use between two and five news Web sites, while only 12 percent use more than six such sites. A full 79 percent of online news consumers, meanwhile, rarely if ever have clicked on an online ad.

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Report: News Media Running Out of Time to Find a New Model

Recently, Amazon announced that it was offering 70 percent royalty rates to authors interested in self-publishing for the Kindle platform. That rate is considerably higher than the 10-ish percent standard in the publishing industry today for print and 25 percent for digital. So where are all the new authors with books flying off the e-shelves and onto the iPads? And if publication is so cheap today, why can’t authors demand higher royalty rates?

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Publishers: The New Filter-Tips

Document-sharing site Scribd.com launched a new feature Wednesday allowing users to easily transfer many of the site’s 10 million books, magazines and documents to mobile devices, including Amazon’s Kindle, the Nook e-reader and the Apple iPhone. The feature works differently for each device. For some devices, such as the Kindle or iPhone, for instance, it’s a simple matter of entering an email address or telephone number to which Scribd should send the content.

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Scribd Spreads the Words From PCs to Mobile Devices

Google has opted not to attempt further renegotiations of its Digital Books settlement agreement with the Authors Guild despite objections the DoJ lodged earlier this month. Instead, it is gambling that the judge will see its view of the matter. In a court filing, Google asked Judge Denny Chin to accept the $125 million agreement it forged with the organization, arguing that it won’t hurt competition in the digital books space and, more importantly, will not violate the intellectual property rights of authors of so-called orphan works.

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Google Crosses Fingers on Book Settlement Deal

On January 20, a major speech took place: No, it was not the State of the Union address, but Steve Jobs’ announcement of the release of the iPad. The iPad has already started to change the landscape of digital publishing: After a few days of a public battle, Amazon was forced to capitulate to a new deal with Macmillan, one of the six largest publishers; on Friday, Hachette started to make noise too. Previously, Amazon set the prices — typically a default of $9.99. This scheme lost money for the e-tailer but promoted the sales of the Kindle reader.

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Ripping the Wrong Page From Apple’s E-Playbook