The Raw Shark Texts, is selling the Kindle version of his book for £1 at Amazon.co.uk in an attempt to boost it into Amazon's top 100." />

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series, Life Pereccalled “an exciting new project” by Chad Post of Open Letter and Three Percent. Why can't Nicholson Baker write about sex? And why can Javier Marias? We investigate why porn is a dead end, and why seduction paves the way for the sex writing of the future. Read an excerpt.

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Translate This Book!

Ever wonder what English is missing? Called "a fascinating Life Perecread" by The New Yorker, Translate This Book! brings together over 40 of the top translators, publishers, and authors to tell us what books need to be published in English. Get it on Kindle.

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Last Samurai

Fall Read: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

A group read of one of the '00s most-lauded postmodern novels. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.
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Two great online lit magazines team up to read a mammoth court drama, the world's first novel.
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More Crazy Ebook Stuff

The entrepreneur in me loves seeing all the business models people are trying out in these Wild West days of the Internet and ebooks. For instance, Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts, is selling the Kindle version of his book for £1 at Amazon.co.uk in an attempt to boost it into Amazon’s top 100.

I wonder how he sold this idea to the publisher (or vice versa). Obviously at £1 The Raw Shark Texts is being sold at a loss. However, since The Raw Shark Texts was published well before anyone ever bought a Kindle, an economist would look at the costs of writing, editing, and bringing to market the book as already sunk, and therefore irrelevant to the question of profit. Then it simply becomes a matter of the amount of money the publisher is losing by selling this book at £1, instead of what it could be getting by selling it at the normal £7.99 price, and if the benefits of attaining a higher rank in Amazon outweigh that loss.

Which is to say, I don’t have much idea if this is ultimately a profitable idea (and I’m guessing that neither do Hall and his publisher), but its cool to see people trying these things out. If anything, publishing is an industry in need of new models, and it’s good to see people on the business side embracing the potential of the Internet to shake things up.

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  1. eBook Market Expanding The New York Times reports that Amazon’s Kindle is currently out of stock, letting some of the other players in the field move in. The...
  2. eBook Prices: Can They Fall Further? Continuing the ebook pricing conversation, Rich Mintz (from Obama’s online campaign) has this to say: As a heavy consumer of books (and a former independent...
  3. Your Ebook Is Spying on You I want to start this post by reaffirming that I buy and read and enjoy ebooks, and that they seem to be injecting a significant...
  4. Amazon Is Losing Money on Each $9.99 Ebook Publishers Weekly confirms something I've long suspected: Currently, publishers make as much money on Kindle editions as print editions, since Amazon, the largest e-book...
  5. Second Life It’ll be interesting to see if more authors try to improve their chances of publishing/selling in the future by reprinting previous material for free on...

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December 30th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized

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