Amazon vs Apple and publishers

While the war to make ebooks available at very low prices might just be beginning, it looks like there is at least one giant called Amazon fighting on our side. Big names like Apple and publishers like Simon & Schuster Inc., Hachette Book Group, Pearson, Macmillan and HarperCollins might be standing against us, but now that the dispute is taken at the level of giants we can expect big changes to the malleable scenery of ebook selling.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal,  the US Justice Department has warned Apple and the five publishers mentioned above that it plans to sue them for colluding to raise the prices of electronic books. This comes following Amazon's decisions to reject deals with publishers that would allow Amazon to sell their ebooks at any price.

Library.nu reincarnated

Library.nu might have closed its doors but in one of my previous posts somebody left a comment that its reincarnation is already online. Although, there was no link mentioned (and you will not find such a link anywhere on this blog either) if I can find the site, you can too. True enough it looked as if it contained the same files as library.nu. Maybe not the ones uploaded over the last week before its closing, I got the impression that it was more like a snapshot of the library.nu a couple of months old, but close enough. There was also no option as far as I could tell for users to upload books but the downloading was significantly simplified to just one click.

Library.nu and the 99 cents movement

My previous post was an open letter to authors and publishers to fight piracy by lowering the prices of their ebooks to $1. What I didn't know when I was writing it was that many authors were already familiar with a similar concept, although for very different reasons: the 99 cents movement. This is nothing more that simply have your books selling at $0.99.

Although some writers tend to argue against such a pricing model, others have already encompassed it. Even if for them is mainly a tool for promotional purposes, at least it is a step in the right direction. As a particular example, Joe Konrath tried an experiment in selling some of his books at $0.99 inspired by the success of Victorine Lieske. The results were good and now he plans to always have some of his books selling below $1. So why doesn't everybody do it?