Amazon’s $1 million secret--By quietly supporting small presses and literary nonprofits, is Amazon backing book culture or buying off critics? From @salon

Yes, much of the literary world is in full-throated revolt against Amazon’s dominance — bookstores fear Amazon will push them out of business, authors worry about deep discounting, and the Department of Justice is considering the major publishers’ challenge over the price of e-books. But amid the public and private rancor, the massive e-retailer is very quietly trying to make friends in the book world. Its strategy is simple and employs a weapon Amazon has in overwhelming supply: Money.

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Seven top stats on Blurb's big role in self publishing

More details: Landa launches nanographic printing @drupa2012

Benny Landa, the founder of digital print brand Indigo, is set to launch a new type of digital printing at Drupa, which is being heralded as the ‘second digital revolution in print’.

Landa Corporation’s nanography print category is said to offer the versatility of digital with the qualities and speed of offset printing.

At the heart of the nanographic printing process is Landa NanoInk. Comprised of pigment particles only tens of nanometers in size (a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide), these nano-pigments are extremely powerful absorbers of light and enable unprecedented image qualities. Landa nanographic printing is characterized by ultra-sharp dots of extremely high uniformity, high-gloss fidelity and the broadest CMYK color gamut of any printing process.

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Ryobi and Miyakoshi 6-up Liquid Toner Sheetfed Digital Press for @drupa2012

TOKYO, Apr 02, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Miyakoshi Printing Machinery Co., Ltd. and Ryobi Ltd. have jointly developed a 6-up, 29-inch liquid toner-based digital printing press. It is the world’s first digital sheetfed press in its class capable of B2-size printing at up to 8,000 sheets per hour.

The new press will be exhibited as a pre-market model at the Miyakoshi booth (Hall 9, Stand A04) at drupa 2012, the world’s largest international print industry trade fair, to be held May 3-16 in Dusseldorf, Germany. Ferrostaal markets and sells RYOBI® printing equipment in the U.S. and Canada. 

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Prices for eBooks on Kindle could tumble as deal in Apple book price-fixing case is just 'weeks away'. From @MailOnline

Book prices on Amazon's Kindle and other e-readers could tumble after a deal in a major price-fixing case is said to be 'close'.
America's Justice Department is in the closing stages of a deal with Apple and major publishers.
The deal would call a halt to a deal struck by Apple which prevented publishers selling books via Amazon and other online stores at lower prices than via Apple's iTunes Store.

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Amazon.com, the company that changed the way people buy books more than a decade ago, now appears poised to rewrite the rules of publishing.

The bad news came to McFarland & Co. in an email from Amazon.com. The world's largest Internet retailer wanted better wholesale terms for the small publisher's books. Starting Jan. 1, 2012 — then only 19 days away — Amazon would buy the publisher's books at 45 percent off the cover price, roughly double its current price break.

For McFarland, an independent publisher of scholarly books situated in the mountains of North Carolina, Amazon's email presented a money-losing proposition.

"It was the apocalypse," said Karl-Heinz Roseman, director of sales and marketing at McFarland, which has a long track record of giving all its retail partners the same discount.

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When Should Writers Work for Free? From @galleycat

When should writers work for free? It is one of the most difficult questions facing writers in the 21st Century as unpaid outlets multiply online. In an interview at The Paris Review, we found a historic moment when famous authors wrote for free in a completely unknown publication. When the legendary editor Robert Silvers launched The New York Review of Books in 1962, he went straight to the most talented writers in the country and asked them to work for free. Check it out: Our thought was to think of the best writers in the world to review the books of the season—even people who hadn’t written book reviews for years or ever. Many of them we knew—Norman Mailer, [William] Styron, W. H. Auden, Edmund Wilson. We said, “Look, we have three weeks, we can’t pay a penny, will you do it?” And they all did.