Wal-Mart Fires the Kindle - all the eNews

WAL-MART have decided to stop selling the Kindle, a decision which will affect the UK's third largest supermarket chain, ASDA which is owned by WAL-MART. Wal-Mart's decision comes after a similar decision by Target in May. Amazon has been selling lower-priced tablets at thin - if any - profit margins to boost sales of digital media like books and music from its online store. That makes it less attractive for major retailers to carry Kindles in their stores.


Sony and Amazon are having fun with an eBook price war, slashing some bestselling titles to just 20p. The retailers are taking the hit on these loss leaders, however, paying the publishers as if the titles were selling at their normal price.Price wars aren’t new to publishing, yet, predictably, various people are up in arms about what’s really just a publicity stunt. One athour Peter James whose latest bestseller is selling for 20p spoke to the Guardian newspaper and said -

“I’m still getting royalties as if it were full price … so I’m a really happy bunny,” said James.
But the author feels that while the offer is attractive in the short term, “it has a lot of long term dangers”. “What’s worrying is that the 20p price point sets a precedent. The public starts getting used to paying even less,” he said. And unable to compete on price, the sector of the market that will “lose out in the long term is the independent bookshop,” believes the novelist. “That’s my biggest worry.”

Sales of children’s e-books nearly tripled over the first six months of this year compared with the same period in 2011, figures from the Publishers Association (PA) showed yesterday.

Richard Mollet, chief executive of the PA, said that 2.6 million children’s e-books were sold over the first half of this year, compared to 1 million the previous year.

The recent reports that actor Bruce Willis and Apple have clashed over who owns digital content that he bought,  has opened up a can of worms. Bruce Willis apparently wanted to leave his vast iTunes library to relatives when he Dies Hard but Apple were quick to point out that the licence to use the music is not transferable. Do we own any of the digital content we buy? It seems that when someone dies then all the digital content they have bought such as MP3's and eBooks dies with them and can not be transferred, or willed to relatives. Bruce Willis was heard to comment on the situation - 'Yippee kai yay Applefuckers!"  Check out the story in more depth HERE.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/09/20/4839167/news-summary-wal-mart-to-stop.html#storylink=cpy