Book Buyers Begin Receiving Price-Fixing Settlement Credits
Credits from the settlement of Apple’s ebook price-fixing lawsuit started hitting reader accounts this week. Amazon was the first out of the gate. (I got $25.67.) Barnes & Noble and Kobo said that their customers’ credits should be coming soon. Basically, if you bought ebooks from any of the major U.S. retailers over the last few years, go check your accounts. You get a credit of $6.73 for every NYT bestseller and $1.57 for all other ebooks. I’m not sure why popular books are so disproportionately reimbursed, but that’s the deal they struck. You have a year to use them up, so get to it.
The Best-Selling Books from the First Half of 2016
Business Insider plumbed Amazon’s depths to find the 20 best-selling books of the first six months of 2016. As is often the case, seeing a list of the books that people are actually buying shows just how scattered (and backlist-heavy) the titles are. Business, cooking, coloring books, children’s: in general, not the books that get talked about in book circles, but the books that provide the money that makes the publishing world go round. Strangely, the best-selling book hasn’t even been released yet. Can you guess? (Check your answer here).
Barnes & Noble: Hanging in There, Just
The still champ of U.S. brick and mortar book sales released its 2015 financial results this week, which are interesting to book lovers for one reason: we want to know if B&N is going to make it. The long and short of it seems to be: probably? Nook continues to be a millstone around B&N’s neck, but the stores themselves are holding up OK. I can’t help but wonder if Amazon’s recent push to try their own physical bookstores in a few affluent suburbs that are B&N’s bread and butter isn’t the corporate version of a vulture circling a struggling wildebeest.
Thanks to Sober Stick Figure by Amber Tozer for sponsoring This Week in Books:
Sober Stick Figure is Amber Tozer’s unflinchingly honest account of her three-decade long romance with alcohol, the eventual end of her addiction, and how booze almost destroyed her – all told with the help of subversively child-like stick figures. Amber writes about (and illustrates) the crazy, harsh, sometimes laughably ridiculous truths regarding addiction, denial, and getting sober. Dubbed by The Chicago Tribune as “a powerful and often hilarious reminder that we’re at our best when we’re not afraid to be ourselves,” Sober Stick Figure is the story of a long road to recovery, at once sweet, tragic, funny, and ultimately inspiring.