Melville House Books

Amazon

• ‘Just a joke’: Amazon gets more money from UK government grants than it pays in tax

  In the continuing saga of Amazon’s tax dodging (see here and here for just a couple of our reports on this), it was revealed this week that the company’s UK operation made £4.2bn in sales… Read more »

• Amazon employees strike in Germany

  More than 1,000 staffers at two German Amazon warehouses walked off the job Tuesday in a one-day work stoppage. The workers are seeking higher pay and collective bargaining agreements, which are… Read more »

• Dan Brown causes price wars, bookshops party like it’s 1999

  There are loads of things we predicted the new Dan Brown novel would bring: clumsy, soul-destroying prose, translators cast into working conditions resembling the pits of hell, Tom Hanks looking… Read more »

• A user’s guide to Amazon Coins

  As we discussed back in February, Amazon has been working on a digital currency specifically for the Kindle Fire, and now it’s finally here. Only three questions remains: how fast… Read more »

• Amazon launches “Kindle Love Stories” podcast and Goodreads book club, eats itself

  You didn’t think that Amazon would just leave Goodreads alone did you, after subsuming it into its gaping maw earlier this year? No, rather than maintaining Goodreads as the user-generated… Read more »

• Microsoft may buy Nook, B&N grows hair in strange places

  Barnes & Noble has been going through some changes this year. They have been swelling in odd places. They are sometimes angry or sad without knowing why. And people are… Read more »

• Amazon temps sue for backpay, German Amazon strike imminent

  Workers for a temp agency that supplies staff to Amazon warehouses are suing for lost wages, accusing their employer—Integrity Staffing Solutions—of not paying employees “for all the time they actually… Read more »

• Sales tax fairness legislation passed in Senate

  Over the past few years, bookstores nationwide have protested the price advantage conferred on Amazon by not having to collect sales tax. Currently, because of a 1992 Supreme Court ruling, states… Read more »

• South Korean bookseller sets new standard for rock-bottom ebook prices

  The U.S. isn’t the only place where corporations are dropping ebook prices below levels the industry can support. South Korea’s largest bookstore, Kyobo (not to be confused with Canada’s lovely Kobo),… Read more »

• How short is too short for a stand-alone ebook?

  Jason Boog of Galleycat reported last week that some authors publishing shorter works with the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing program (“I could have released my book with a lot of… Read more »