The Future of the Book
June 8, 2008
Amazon’s $3.6 Million Outage? 0
by C. Max Magee
On Friday, as you may or may not have noticed, Amazon went down for about two hours. These days, we’re used to 100% uptime from the internet’s supersites – Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, et al – but the Amazon outage reminded me of the late 1990s when even the biggest dot-coms, struggling to scale to the [...]
May 27, 2008
Online Bookstore Drama 1
by C. Max Magee
Who knew. More than ten years after Amazon revolutionized retailing and became a dot-com-boom-and-bust poster child, online bookstores are once again a hot topic. Part of the reason is that corporate book retailing is experiencing a particularly tumultuous period. As we discussed over the weekend, Borders is in dire straits and may be bought out [...]
April 30, 2008
The Amazon Push 3
by Garth Risk Hallberg
A few months ago, I wrote about some of the oddities of Amazon’s customer review system. I suggested that certain of Amazon’s “Top Reviewers” had become semi-professionalized, and that some five-star customer reviews reach readers the same way reviews in the Times (and on blogs) do: as part of a well-organized press push. A story [...]
April 28, 2008
Gutenberg Eulogies? 6
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Is there a “crisis in reading?” Last quarter’s Barnes & Noble conference call; the well-publicized demise of certain book review supplements and independent bookstores; the gripes of our editor friends; and a whiff of desperation around the marketing of literary fiction (typically referred to as “so tough” or “a hard sell”) would seem to confirm [...]
April 3, 2008
Amazon and the Future of Retailing 0
by C. Max Magee
Amazon isn’t content just to get your online shopping dollars. Now it wants to travel with you, untethered. Amazon’s recently unveiled TextBuyIt lets you buy stuff from the online store with a few keystrokes on any old mobile phone. The implications here are interesting. Shopping by text message seems clunky, especially in the age of [...]
March 3, 2008
Free Beautiful Children: The Numbers 11
by C. Max Magee
Random House’s experiment allowing readers a limited time only free download of Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children is now over and the numbers are in. Random House publicist Jynne Martin tells The Millions that during the 72 hours that the site was up, it received just under 30,000 pageviews, 20,000 unique visitors, and just under 15,000 [...]