Allowing students access to unpaid, small excerpts of copyrighted works promotes the spread of knowledge because it reduces the cost of education, the judge said. On the other hand, decreased income for publishers could reduce their ability to produce academic textbooks and scholarly works, thereby diminishing the spread of knowledge.Evans said that “decidedly small” excerpts could be copied by Georgia State. In most circumstances, she determined, it is permissible for universities and colleges to copy 10 percent of a book or one chapter of a book with 10 or more chapters.Brandon Butler, director of public policy initiatives for the Association of Research Libraries, said the publishers lawsuit had had a chilling effect on university libraries. “There was a feeling of being under siege,” he said. “They took us to court saying we were shameless pirates.”

via Judge rules largely for Georgia State in copyright case  | ajc.com.

Douglas County Libraries, in Colorado, is trying something new: buying eBooks directly from publishers and hosting them on its own platform. That platform is based on the purchase of content at discount; owning—not leasing—a copy of the file; the application of industry-standard DRM on the library’s files; multiple purchases based on demand; and a “click to buy” feature.Its new DCL Digital Branch is one outcome of this strategy. As of this writing, more than 800 publishers have signed up, and their works are seamlessly integrated into and delivered from the library catalog, rather than from third-party sites.After integrating the ebooks it owns into its catalog, Douglas County Libraries began installing digital branch hardware and software in six of its Colorado locations in February.In a physical library, the digital branch features interactive touch-screen technology that allows library patrons to browse digital content from multiple platforms, including eBooks hosted by DCL, Overdrive, 3M and Freegal music. It integrates seamlessly with DCL’s library catalog, patron database, and its mobile app, DCL to Go. This same experience is also available online.The digital branch allows patrons to view and explore digital content using their hands and eyes the same way they might explore a traditional collection, with added functionality like immediate access to staff recommendations, most popular titles, and new content. Digital branch technology and features will change and improve as Douglas County Libraries’ eContent collection grows and patron use of digital content evolves.Douglas County Libraries’ model for purchasing eBooks directly from publishers is gaining interest from more and larger publishers, with five more joining just in the last week. DCL’s revolutionary distribution model is attracting not just publishers, but libraries across the nation. Marmot Library Consortium on Colorado’s western slope and Anythink Libraries in Adams County will soon provide eContent hosted by DCL. Other library systems have shown interest as well, from regions including California, New England, New York and New Jersey, and the Colorado State Library has created eVoke, an internet portal for libraries wishing to replicate DCL’s eBook model.

via Libraries set out to own their ebooks – Boing Boing.

Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books VanishMAR 30 2012, 12:51 PM ET 71Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950.Paul HealdThe above chart shows a distribution of 2500 newly printed fiction books selected at random from Amazons warehouses. Whats so crazy is that there are just as many from the last decade as from the decade between 1910 and 1920. Why? Because beginning in 1923, most titles are copyrighted. Books from before 1923 tend to be in the public domain, and the result is that Amazon carries them — lots of them. The chart comes from University of Illinois law professor Paul Heald. In a talk at the University of Canterbury in March 16, he explained how he made it and what it shows. He said:

via The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books Vanish – Rebecca J. Rosen – Technology – The Atlantic.

Copyright stagnationPaul Heald demonstrated the effect of the stagnant US copyright wall in seminar at Canterbury last week.Recall that books published through 1922 are in the public domain in the US; those published since then are covered by copyright.Heald dug through some Amazon stats to see what happens to books as they come out of copyright. Heres the rather stunning graph.So any arguments about underexploitation of unprotected works seem untenable.If this were a moving wall, maybe it wouldnt be so bad: eventually, books would come out of copyright and be released in new editions. But Disney does keep going back and insisting that nothing can ever be returned to the Commons from which they so liberally drew, and Congress loves Disney; we might reasonably expect another copyright term extension act to keep the wall fairly rigid.So while I can get Pride and Prejudice in remix with either vampires or zombies, Im not betting on being able to read a version of Good-bye, Mr. Chips in which he protects his students from the werewolf menace as well as offering them solace through the Great War. The werewolf version practically writes itself – the Germans infect some injured British soldiers with lycanthropy just after a full moon, knowing theyll be back in Britain by the next full moon….Heres Pauls SSRN page. The chart above isnt in any of his released papers, but is an update to some of the matters he covered here. His talk for the department is embedded below; the audio isnt fantastic, but all the slides are there. Pride and Prejudice is unreadable except in remix.Update: Paul Heald clarifies the chart source data:Hi, I just wanted to note that Amazon does not know when a book it sells was first published. It only knows the date of publication of the volume that it is selling, e.g. Treasure Island could have a date of 2002, if that’s the edition Amazon is selling. I had to check each of the 2500 books at the Library of Congress to determine the actual initial publication date. This is why stats taken from an Amazon “year of publication” stats don’t match up. Cheers, Paul Heald

via Offsetting Behaviour: Copyright stagnation.

The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.Enlarge ImageGetty ImagesApple CEO Tim Cook speaks during Wednesdays iPad product launch.Several of the parties have held talks to settle the antitrust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said. If successful, such a settlement could have wide-ranging repercussions for the industry, potentially leading to cheaper e-books for consumers. However, not every publisher is in settlement discussions. AllThingsDs Ina Fried takes a first look at Apples new tablet, which was announced today at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.The five publishers facing a potential suit are CBS Corp.s Simon & Schuster Inc.; Lagardere SCA s Hachette Book Group; Pearson PLC s Penguin Group USA; Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and HarperCollins Publishers Inc., a unit of News Corp. , which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

via U.S. Warns Apple, Publishers on E-Book Pricing – WSJ.com.

Los Angeles, CA – Last week a website called “library.nu” disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu formerly Gigapedia had offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free. And not just any books – not romance novels or the latest best-sellers – but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities.The texts ranged from so-called “orphan works” out-of-print, but still copyrighted to recent issues; from poorly scanned to expertly ripped; from English to German to French to Spanish to Russian, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese text. It was a remarkable effort of collective connoisseurship. Even the pornography was scholarly: guidebooks and scholarly books about the pornography industry. For a criminal underground site to be mercifully free of pornography must alone count as a triumph of civilisation.To the publishing industry, this event was a victory in the campaign to bring the unruly internet under some much-needed discipline. To many other people – namely the users of the site – it was met with anger, sadness and fatalism. But who were these sad criminals, these barbarians at the gates ready to bring our information economy to its knees? They are students and scholars, from every corner of the planet.Pirating to learn”The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn.”The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn. This is what our world should be filled with. This is what scholars work hard to create: a world of reading, learning, thinking and scholarship. The users of library.nu were would-be scholars: those in the outer atmosphere of learning who wanted to know, argue, dispute, experiment and write just as those in the universities do.Maybe they were students once, but went on to find jobs and found families. We made them in some cases – we gave them a four-year taste of the life of the mind before sending them on their way with unsupportable loans. In other cases, they made themselves, by hook or by crook.So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? The publishers think it is a great success in the war on piracy; that it will lead to more revenue and more control over who buys what, if not who reads what. The pirates – the people who create and run such sites – think that shutting down library.nu will only lead to a thousand more sites, stronger and better than before.But both are missing the point: the global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices. The users of library.nu – these barbarians at the gate of the publishing industry and the university – are legion.

via The disappearing virtual library – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.

A large coalition of publishing firms and related trade organizations has taken legal action against what the Association of American Publishers in Washington, D.C., described on Wednesday as “one of the largest pirate web-based businesses in the world.”

At the request of 17 publishing companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press and Macmillan, a Munich judge on Monday granted injunctions against illegal posting or sharing of online book files by two websites. Library.nu is alleged to have posted links to hundreds of thousands of illegal PDF copies of books since December 2010, Ed McCoyd, an attorney for the Association of American Publishers, told The Huffington Post. The majority of these uploads allegedly went through the website iFile.it, he said.

via Library.nu, Book Downloading Site, Targeted In Injunctions Requested By 17 Publishers.

If you copy media you purchased, you’re smart.

If you copy media you didn’t purchase, you’re cheap.

If you copy media you didn’t purchase AND you make a profit off of it, you’re a thief.

via Library.nu and Ifile.it Shut Down – Slashdot.

Ralph Spoilsport writes “A coalition of 17 publishing companies has shut down library.nu and ifile.it, charging them with pirating ebooks. This comes less than a month after megaupload was shut down, and SOPA was stopped. If the busting of cyberlockers continues at this pace and online library sharing dismantled, this under-reported story may well be the tip of a very big iceberg — one quite beyond the P&L sheets of publishers and striking at basic human rights as outlined in the contradictions of the UN Charter. Is this a big deal — a grim coalition of corporate power? Or just mopping up some scurvy old pirates? Or somewhere in between?” Adds new submitter roaryk, “According to the complaint, the sites offered users access to 400,000 e-books and made more than $11 million in revenue in the process. The admins, Fidel Nunez and Irina Ivanova, have been tracked down using their PayPal donation account, which was not anonymous. Despite the claims of the industry the site admins say they were barely able to cover the server costs with the revenue.”

via Library.nu and Ifile.it Shut Down – Slashdot.

An international alliance of publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Pearson Education Ltd, has served successful cease-and-desist orders on a piracy operation with an estimated turnover of £7m.The two platforms, sharehoster service www.ifile.it and link library www.library.nu, had together created an “internet library” making more than 400,000 e-books available as free illegal downloads. The operators generated an estimated turnover of €8m £6.7m through advertising, donations and sales of premium-level accounts, according to a report by German law firm Lausen which helped co-ordinate the alliance.The other publishers involved also comprised Georg Thieme; HarperCollins; Hogrefe; Macmillan Publishers Ltd; Cengage Learning; John Wiley & Sons;the McGraw-Hill Companies; Pearson Education Inc; Oxford University Press; Springer; Taylor & Francis; C H Beck; and Walter De Gruyter. The alliance was also co-ordinated by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association Börsenverein and the International Publishers Association IPA,Jens Bammel, secretary general of the IPA, said: “Today, the international book industry has shown that it continues to stand up against organised copyright crime.”We will not tolerate freeloaders who make unjustified profits by depriving authors and publishers of their due reward. This is an important step towards a more transparent, honest and fair trade of digital content on the Internet,” he said.Alexander Skipis, Börsenverein c.e.o., added: “This case demonstrates, in particular in the context of current debates, that systematic copyright infringement has developed into a highly criminal and lucrative business.”

via International publisher alliance shuts down piracy site | The Bookseller.

“Amazon’s released their list of 2011′s best-selling books, revealing that 40% of the best-selling ebooks didn’t even make it onto their list of the best-selling print books. The #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks of the year weren’t even available in print editions, while four of the top 10 best-selling print books didn’t make it into the top 100 best-selling ebooks. ‘It couldn’t be more clear that Kindle owners are choosing their material from an entirely different universe of books,’ notes one Kindle site, which points out that five of the best-selling ebooks came from two million-selling ebook authors — Amanda Hocking and John Locke — who are still awaiting the release of their books in print. And five of Amazon’s best-selling ebooks were Kindle-only ‘Singles,’ including a Stephen King short story which actually outsold another King novel that he’d released in both ebook and print formats. And Neal Stephenson’s ‘Reamde’ was Amazon’s #99 best-selling print book of 2011, though it didn’t even make it onto their list of the 100 best-selling ebooks of the year. ‘People who own Kindles are just reading different books than the people who buy printed books,’ reports the Kindle site, which adds ’2011 may be remembered as the year that hundreds of new voices finally found their audiences.’”

via Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters.

WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

via WordPress › Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS.

Amazon has finally announced its long-anticipated Kindle lending library, allowing Kindle and Kindle app users to borrow Amazon’s e-books from thousands of libraries across the US. Users will be able to find the Kindle books on their participating public library’s website and check them out through Amazon, which will send the book directly to users’ devices over Whispersync.”Libraries are a critical part of our communities and we’re excited to be making Kindle books available at more than 11,000 local libraries around the country,” Amazon’s Kindle director Jay Marine said in a statement. “We’re even doing a little extra here—normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no. But we’re fixing this by extending our Whispersync technology to library books, so your notes, highlights and bookmarks are always backed up and available the next time you check out the book or if you decide to buy the book.”The ability to make notes and highlights—and subsequently sync them back to the system for review later—is certainly a major plus. The downside, of course, is that the e-books have to be “returned” after a certain period of time, just like any other library book. Amazon doesn’t specify on its site how long the books are borrow-able for, but when asked, Amazon spokesperson Kinley Campbell said that the expiration time varies by library and by the book.”Generally [it will be] 7-14 days,” Campbell told Ars. “We recommend checking with local libraries on questions related to availability and specific books.”Seven to 14 days isn’t a lot of time to read an entire book for some people, but it’s hard to argue with free, borrowed books. Our only complaint with this announcement is that there seems to be no comprehensive list of the 11,000 participating libraries—even Amazon’s FAQ page about public library books remains vague on this question. The requirement is that the library offers e-books via third party service OverDrive, though, so it’s safe to assume that most major libraries will be participating to some degree or another. You Chicagoans out there get to be lazy, as I’ve already confirmed that Kindle books can be found via the CPL website.Edit: Removed links to Amazon due to technical CMS problems on our end. See comments for proper links for now.

via Kindle e-books now available to borrow from 11,000 US libraries.

The publishers allege that GSU’s hosting of over 6,700 works for 600 classes commits direct copyright infringement, due to the school officials directly uploading the material; contributory copyright infringement, due to inducing others to download, copy, and read the unlicensed material; and vicarious copyright infringement, due to profiting from the alleged illegal actions.The uploaded items range from 14 pages to a few hundred pages per course. In one instance, the publishers found an entire semester’s worth of readings—nearly 80 different uploads—for an Introduction to Anthropology class. Shortly after the complaint was filed, some of the online e-reserves required a GSU username and password; however, links to the e-reserves are still located on online syllabi and course websites.GSU rebutted the claims, saying it was protected by fair use and “sovereign state immunity,” a doctrine that generally protects states and their entities from being sued by citizens. Judge Orinda Evens agreed in part with the defense dismissing the direct and vicarious infringement claims. In the first instance, she concluded that none of the named defendants directly engaged in the infringement, while in the latter instance she found no evidence that GSU profited from the alleged uploading. Evens pointed to professors who claimed they only upload material if they believe students would not buy the text if it were assigned, and who say that professors would stop using the system if they had to pay licensing fees.

via Campus copyright: publishers sue over university “e-reserves”.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

  This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
and which should be  available to everyone at no cost, but most
have previously only been made available at high prices through
paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the  documents here is typically sold for $19
USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as
cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article
at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to
locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a
checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I
published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who
profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney
General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers
from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd systemΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥the authors are not paid for their
writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics),
and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the
authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously
expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access
fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals,
but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little
significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The
"publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly
weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary
scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather
than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They
are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the
resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask
for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on
the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to
which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they
realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would
benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed
to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending
it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic
documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid
scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their
attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has
classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions
with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give
up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for
creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more
works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence,
when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use
threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly
owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and
lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

These particular documents are the historic back archives of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal SocietyΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥a prestigious scientific
journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published
prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some
18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind,
and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available
freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's
viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to
Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, WikisourceΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ where they
could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting
historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus
was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at
the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the
several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of
other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing:
publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation
from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish
reproductionΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥scanning the documentsΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ created a new copyright
interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial
watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They
might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained
the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover
the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only
unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and
the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is
legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary,
the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archivesΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but "free"
only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about
100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not
disseminators of knowledgeΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥as their lofty mission statements
suggestΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing
they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are
valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one
steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word
on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value
they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence
competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific
inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive
copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question
of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not
paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access
to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued
survival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous
industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding,
then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justifiedΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥it will be one
less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent
lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers
a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed
out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would
probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous
charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe
that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful
applications which come of this archive.

- ----
Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
gmaxwell@gmail.com  Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

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via Papers from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, fro download torrent – TPB.

The publisher says it tried everything it could to stamp out these unauthorized copies, but it was unable to stop the flood — and it’s a good thing it couldn’t, since the book rocketed to the No. 1 slot. It has since fallen to No. 2. Although it remains to be seen how many books get sold when the official version is available, there’s no question that the publisher and the author have effectively gotten millions of dollars worth of free marketing for their title. The publisher admits it has spent virtually nothing on marketing so far, but has already boosted the size of the print run.

via The Future of Media: It’s Not Piracy, It’s Marketing — Tech News and Analysis.

The explosive growth of ereading is creating the biggest change to the publishing industry since Gutenberg. Bricks-and-mortar sales are declining as digital distribution and self-publishing rise. The rapid proliferation and adoption of ereading devices by tens of millions of US consumers are accelerating these trends.

As ebooks reshape the industry, publishers, booksellers, and device manufacturers need to understand trends and changes in consumption patterns quicker than ever before. Our latest survey uncovers consumer behaviors and attitudes towards ebooks that can help industry players face challenges and exploit opportunities in the brave new world of publishing.

Elastic Path's consumer research report on ebooks reveals:

Why and how consumers read digital content

How much they spend on ebooks versus print books

How they discover books and where they buy

And more….

via Brave New Publishing World: Assessing the Impact of Ebooks on Consumers | Elastic Path Software.

Responses to Amazon.com's hire of Laurence Kirshbaum as publisher have varied from worried to fear of a “dampening” effect on competition among delegates at the BEA conference.

Word that started to spread Sunday night was confirmed first thing Monday morning with the announcement that Kirshbaum, former TimeWarner c.e.o.-turned-agent, would be heading up Amazon's publishing operation in New York.

Everybody knew that an Amazon push into frontlist publishing was coming: the move into original genre books and the cooperation with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was not enough to satisfy the giant's ever-hungry maw. Highly-placed executives from New York houses have been migrating to Amazon for a while, and the company ratcheted up expectations after circulating a recruiting letter for various personnel a few weeks back. The question was only when.

The news spread swiftly around the Javits Center even though the exhibition floor was not yet open, the first day of BEA being devoted to conference sessions. For Kirshbaum, it seemed a natural: as Workman's Bob Miller put it, “Larry missed running the whole show. Being an agent just wasn't the same.”

Independent booksellers took the news in their stride: “it didn't surprise” outgoing ABA president Michael Tucker, whose store is in San Francisco. Another major indie bookseller, Elliott Bay's Rick Simonsen (on Amazon's home turf of Seattle), saw it being “of more concern to publishers than to booksellers at this point. Remember, most booksellers have to deal with B&N's Sterling [publishing subsidiary] already. And Amazon will now get trapped in the real world!”

The proprietor of a store much closer to New York, who preferred to talk on background, said that given the state of Borders, and the likely difficulties Amazon may encounter with B&N, indies might actually get higher discounts on the books Amazon publishes since they will need a bricks and mortar storefront.

What people on the publishing side are feeling—again, off the record for the most part—is worried. Publishers, already feeling squeezed, have been feeling even more so since Monday morning.

Agent Richard Curtis, who doubles as proprietor of E-Reads, one of the earliest e-publishing and POD reprinters of out-of-print books, said: “I think Larry is an iconic branded figure in the American book business and will be the perfect person to bring the old and new worlds of publishing together.

via Amazon’s Kirshbaum move could reduce competition—BEA | The Bookseller.