Big Three Publishers to take on Amazon with Bookish.com website

Amazon to get multinational competition for ebook sales


Consumer frustrations with ebooks are trumpeted by publishers as a reason to launch their own bookish.com website to sell directly to ebook consumers. 

“There’s a frustration with book consumers that there’s no one-stop shopping when it comes to information about books and authors,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “We need to try to recreate the discovery of new books that currently happens in the physical environment, but which we don’t believe is currently happening online.”

As bookstore chains like Borders have liquidated many stores, pressure grows on publishers to depend less on brick-and-mortar retail outlets to promote their books. But few have found easy and effective ways to communicate directly with readers, who are already confounded by too many choices in the book marketplace.

Backed by Hachette, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster (three of the major publishers who have been fighting with Amazon over its e-book pricing structure), the project is also getting support from AOL’s Huffington Post 

Typically Amazon and Barnes & Noble only sell U.S. ebooks on their websites, preventing world-wide customers from using Amazon.com or BN.com to buy locally published books. 


Australian ebook site Booki.sh
However for Australian ebooks, a similarly named website has already been launched: is this already doomed?

Booki.sh is both a bookselling platform, designed to connect publishers with independent booksellers, and a personal library application. If you buy a book from ebooks.readings.com.au (and soon, our other affiliated retailers), it will appear immediately in your library. 

Booki.sh books can be read on Macs, PCs, iPhones, iPads, the Kindle3, the latest Blackberry phones – in fact, on any device with a modern web browser. There’s nothing to install.

Readers can go from following a link on a webpage to buying a book to reading it in seconds. On most devices, you can read books whether you’re online or offline – check our compatibility guide for more.

Sign up for a Booki.sh account or start shopping with Readings Ebooks right away.                   

However I have encountered problems with Booki.sh.com not rendering ebook pages correctly in Google Chrome browser, so more work needs to be done to make the Aussie site entirely suitable.

Amazon has countered German criticism by launching a German ebook website. 

Now all you Germans can enjoy ebooks in German on your Kindle ereaders:

The other day, Amazon Germany announced the launch of theirGerman ebook service, in which they have launched a whole new range of German language ebooks on their German Kindle ebook store.

This is great news for all German readers, as it means as Amazon’s press release puts it:

More than 650,000 titles, 71 of 100 Spiegel bestsellers, and over 25,000 German-language titles with thousands of German classics downloadable for free only on Kindle.

Concurrently with this launch, Amazon also announced the launch of their Buy Once, read Everywhere Kindle Apps for the most popular devices, including iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, PC, Mac and Android-based devices, in a German language version.

However Amazon.com cannot sell music or movie downloads to international customers either. How about it publishers, make the bookish site more comprehensive?