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A report in Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) says “Barnes & Noble is phasing out its PubIt! self-publishing service and relaunching it as NOOK Press, an upgraded ebook self-publishing platform offering an array of new services to authors and publishers.”

B&N is partnering with the self-publishing platform FastPencil (@fastpencil) to supply NOOK Press with its proprietary online authoring technology, while also offering FastPencil authors access to a variety of marketing opportunities via B&N’s NOOK platform.

While B&N is encouraging PubIt! authors to synch their accounts to new NOOK Press accounts, B&N is also planning to phase out new PubIt! accounts and transition new self-publishers to the NOOK Press platform, which essentially builds on PubIt! by adding new services. Indeed, sales of self-published ebooks continue to grow on the NOOK Platform and the company said they represent about 25% of all ebook sales on NOOK devices. According to B&N, PubIt! titles grow by about 20% each quarter and general self-published titles offering through the NOOK are growing by 24% each quarter.

Read this in full.

Read the news release.

Also read our previous blogpost, "Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

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In Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly), Lynn Garrett (@LynniGarrett) reports that Zondervan (@Zondervan), a division of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, is launching Blink, a new YA imprint, with titles debuting this fall.

Chriscynethia Floyd, vp of marketing for Zondervan, said the imprint is designed for the general trade, not the Christian market: “These would be no different from other YA titles published by HarperCollins. They are for anyone, regardless of faith.” She added, “These will be hopeful books. We won’t go as dark [as some other YA novels], but we will touch on very real issues” while striving for a “positive balance and approach” and “[representing] morals and ethical standards.” Five to six titles per year are planned

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Amazon (@amazon) has acquired Goodreads (@goodreads), a website featuring user-generated reviews of books. Goodreads, which is one of the most popular among a raft of sites created as a book recommendation engine – members are directed to titles by seeing what their friends are reading, or have recommended – does not currently sell any books, but many in the industry saw it as an ideal sales outlet.

The site currently has over 16 million members, averages 37 million unique visitors a month, and has over 30,000 book clubs.

Read this in full.

Read Goodreads announcement.

Salon (@Salon) says the “brilliant business move” shows Amazon is “determined to monopolize book publishing.”

In just five years Goodreads has grown into the largest outlet for armchair reviewers and readers to share their opinions, as well as a safe space for author-reader interactions. Most members saw Goodreads as an unbiased haven for books, a place where they could profess their bookish love free from the ugly noise of commerce. And the noise has certainly been ugly the past few years, with the closing of Borders and many independent bookstores, the consolidation of the corporate publishers, the e-book pricing wars. In the background of all this ugliness has been the rise of Amazon and their unabashedly thuggish way of doing business

Read this in full.

Forbes (@Forbes) sees the purchase as an assault against Bookish (@BookishHQ).

Read this in full.

TOC (@toc) declares, "Amazon marches on toward global retail domination."

And Huff Post Books (@HuffPostBooks) asks, “What Does It Mean for Authors and Readers?”

Also read our previous blogposts, “What's Going On With Readers Today?” and “All About Goodreads.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

A report in the The Bookseller (@thebookseller) says “the crucial role of physical bookshops to a healthy publishing industry” is evident “by findings from both Bowker Market Research UK (@Bowker) and research company Enders Analysis.”

“We estimate that when a bookshop closes, about a third of its sales transfer to another bookshop,” says Enders analyst Douglas McCabe. This means as much as two-thirds of sales disappear. Some of this spend doubtless migrates online, but much of it vanishes from the book sector entirely.”

Both McCabe and BMR director Jo Henry agree on the crucial role of bookshop browsing. Discovery still does not work online, McCabe asserted. “Consumers do not browse the Internet as is often suggested,” he said. Enders Analysis estimates that serendipity and discovery generate as much as two-thirds of UK general book sales, much of this down to bookshops. “There is almost nothing that can be done to sustain the health of the network of bookshops that should be collectively considered too extravagant,” McCabe said. “Without bookshops, publishing would have to rethink its model at every level.”

Read this in full.

The UK bookstore chain Waterstones (@Waterstones) is now “stocking special limited edition books with exclusive extra material to try to give it the edge in the competitive book-selling market. The book retailer has signed contracts with publishers to sell unique versions of their books, only available in Waterstones stores” to lure buyers away from Amazon and other online outlets.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Publishing professional Mike Shatzkin (@MikeShatzkin) writes on his blog about the news that Hyperion plans to sell off its “backlist” to focus its attention on new titles it will develop in conjunction with its corporate cousins at Disney and ABC. He says this follows Wiley’s selling a lot of the most bookstore-dependent parts of its list, including the sale of Frommer’s Guides to Google, in 2012.

Both Hyperion and Wiley are showing us what the publisher of the near future is going to look like. They will be more focused. They will be shedding overheads so they can expand or shrink their offerings more readily to respond to opportunities and circumstances. They will be less dependant on the trade bookstore and book review trade networks. And Hyperion’s decision says something more about the future that Wiley’s doesn’t: book publishing will increasingly be an activity operating in tandem with or in service of other objectives of the owning organization. (There is a parallel here in retailing, where Amazon and Google and Apple fit this description, and Kobo and Barnes & Noble do not.)

...the current state-of-the-art for merchandising and presentation of books online is not very helpful to backlist. Most retailers return a limited number of books (10 or 20) per screen to any query. Customers have limited patience for refreshing screens, so the number of titles an online purchaser “browses through” is far fewer than the number that would catch the same eyes in an equivalent amount of time in a store. This appears to be pushing sales more and more to newer books and books on bestseller lists.

This problem of concentration will probably just get worse as mobile devices become more ubiquitous and the shopping takes places on ever-smaller screens.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Publishing Must Reinvent Itself.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

For MultichannelMerchant (@mcmerchant), George Eberstadt (@georgeeberstadt), founder of social commerce company TurnTo (@TurnTo), writes that “Amazon now offers true social Q&A on most of their product pages.” This is one more step Amazon is taking to try to capture the one retail element online shopping misses: in-store conversational engagement with product experts.

They have built a powerful engine for ensuring that questions reliably get answered by past buyers....

The key to making social Q&A work for eCommerce is speed, and Amazon has done all the right things to make their model fast:

* The question appears immediately on the page when you submit. In the age of Facebook, this is what people expect from a social experience. Not a message that says “We’ll alert you if we decide to accept your question. It may take hours or days...”

* The question is immediately emailed to a large selection of people who actually bought the product.

* The answers get sent immediately back to the asker. That provides fast reminders about the purchase the shopper was considering – while the shopper is still in the buying moment – and a smooth path back to the product detail page complete it. And the answers appear immediately on the site for future shoppers to use and for the asker to view.

* Askers can easily submit follow-up questions, or even just send thanks, back to the answerers. That, too, is email enabled, so that it’s easy to have rapid, back-and-forth dialog about products that one knows about the other needs to learn about.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

The website BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) offers to re-title a few Dr. Seuss books based on their possible underlying meanings. Perhaps the exercise shows how important the correct title is to the success of a book ☺

The Butter Battle Book ≈ The Tragic Futility of the Nuclear Arms Race!

The Sneetches and Other Stories ≈ Racists and Other Stories

The Cat in the Hat ≈ The Virtues of Autonomy, Efficiency, and Skepticism

The Lorax ≈ The Importance of Environmental Awareness in Industrialized Society

Yertle the Turtle ≈ Why Hitler is Dangerous and Other Stories

How the Grinch Stole Christmas ≈ The Psychological Implications of Holiday-Motivated Materialism

Green Eggs and Ham ≈ How Fear of the Unknown Hinders the Developmnet of Informed Opinions

Horton Hears a Who ≈ The Inherent Ethical Issues of Isolationism!

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

USA TODAY’s Bob Minzesheimer (@bookbobminz) reports that, for the 3rd year in a row, Washington, DC, is "America's most literate city," according to an annual statistical study ranking 75 cities with populations of 250,000 and above.

The research, conducted by Central Connecticut State University (@CCSUToday) president John Miller, is based on 6 key indicators: number of bookstores, educational attainment, Internet resources, library resources, periodical publishing resources, and newspaper circulation.

Miller says the study is aimed at shifting attention from school test scores on reading "to how much people are reading, and where are they reading the most." He notes a “troubling trend”: Spending on reading materials, both digital and print, has declined 22% since 2000. In the same period, federal statistics show spending on other forms of entertainment is up 25%.

In a digital age, the survey expands the definition of reading by counting online book orders, ebook readers, and page views on local newspaper websites.

The top 10 cities in 2012:

1. Washington, DC (same as in 2011)

2. Seattle, WA (same as in 2011)

3. Minneapolis, MN (same as in 2011)

4. Pittsburgh, PA (up from No. 6)

5. Denver, CO (up from No. 10)

6. St. Paul, MN (up from No. 12)

7. Boston, MA (down from No. 5)

8. Atlanta, GA (down from No. 4)

9. St. Louis, MO (down from No. 8)

10. Portland, OR (down from No. 11)

Read this in full.

See the study website.

See our previous blogpost, “America’s Most Literate Big Cities.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

BBC Radio 4’s business program The Bottom Line with Evan Davis (@EvanHD) recently (Feb. 9) focused on the sea changes occurring in the world of book publishing.

Like the music industry before it, the print book industry has been turned upside down up by the digital revolution. As sales of ebooks continue to grow, bookshop sales are down from a peak in 2007. So what does the future hold for the bricks-and-mortar bookstore? Will physical books become a thing of the past? And what role will traditional players like publishers, agents, and retailers play in this brave new world?

The program consists of Davis interviewing Jonny Geller, literary agent and joint CEO of Curtis Brown; Victoria Barnsley, CEO and publisher of HarperCollins UK and International; and Michael Tamblyn, Chief Content Officer at Toronto-based ebook retailer Kobo.

According to The Bookseller (@thebookseller), in the program, Barnsley says the idea of the bookshop as a book club, charging customers for “the privilege of browsing, is not that insane,” given the level of threat faced by the general bookshop. Certain shoeshops in the US are already charging customers to try on shoes, she noted.

Barnsley predicted that the level of digital ebook sales would “level off and end up being more like 50/50 [physical books and ebooks] for quite some time, if the physical bookshops survive.” But she said the survival of the physical bookshop was “the big question.” “Readers still do quite like physical books; the question is, will they be able to buy them, actually,” she told Davis.

Listen to this program in full.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Ann Patchett, award-winning author of such novels as Bel Canto and State of Wonder, is also the co-owner of Parnassus (@ParnassusBooks1), an independent bookstore in Nashville. In the above video from the Oprah Winfrey Network, Patchett says independent bookstores are vital for the health of local communities. She says a bookstore is “a community center.”

Also see our blogposts, “Why an Author has Started a Bookstore in Nashville,” “Baker Book House Celebrates Grand (Re)Opening,” and “Somersault Group Reports on Christian Retail Trends.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.