In reaction to the news that Amazon is seeking government approval to establish operations in Canada, the Canadian Booksellers Association released a statement demanding that the government reject the online retailer’s application. From the press release:

CBA contends that allowing Amazon to operate a business within Canada would contravene the Investment Canada Act which requires that foreign investments in the book publishing and distribution sector be compatible with national cultural policies and be of net benefit to Canada and the Canadian-controlled sector.

CBA President Stephen Cribar argues that Amazon’s entry into Canada would detrimentally affect the country’s independent businesses and cultural industries: “Individual Canadian booksellers have traditionally played a key role in ensuring the promotion of Canadian authors and Canadian culture. These are values that no American dot.com retailer could ever purport to understand or promote.”

CBA urges the Canadian government and the Department of Canadian Heritage to continue its support of our unique cultural perspective by placing reasonable limits on American domination of our book market and rejecting Amazon.com’s current application.

The release urges Canadians to write letters to their MPs and to the ministers of industry and culture, and even to Stephen Harper himself, though we all know how he feels about books.

As of this year, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award will be co-presented by Quill & Quire. The six nominees – selected by Q&Q’s editor, Stuart Woods – were announced this morning. The shortlisted books are:

·        No Place Strange by Diana Fitzgerald Bryden (Key Porter Books)
·        Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant (Knopf Canada)
·        The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon (Random House Canada)
·        Goya’s Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky (Hamish Hamilton Canada)
·        Diary of Interrupted Days by Dragan Todorovic (Random House Canada)
·        Daniel O’Thunder by Ian Weir (Douglas & McIntyre)

The judges for the 2010 award are Joseph Boyden, Priscila Uppal, and Hal Wake, the artistic director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival. The winner will receive $7,500, presented at the annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award celebration this April in Toronto. All finalists will receive a $750 gift certificate for Amazon.ca.

It’s not difficult to imagine Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos fluttering his fingertips together and ordering Smithers to remove the buy buttons on book pages that don’t please him. Amazon has yet to allow customers to purchase Macmillan titles due to a dispute over e-book pricing, despite the fact that it announced last Friday it will “capitulate”.

Last night Hachette CEO David Young announced its support of Macmillan, following a similar move from HarperCollins on Wednesday.

From a letter sent out by Young to agents (via MobyLives):

At Hachette Book Group, we have been considering a new pricing model for 
some time, and have decided to transition to selling our e-books through an 
agency model. There are many advantages to the agency model, for our authors, retailers,
 consumers, and publishers. It allows Hachette to make pricing decisions that
 are rational and reflect the value of our authors’ works.

In the long run
 this will enable Hachette to continue to invest in and nurture authors’
 careers – from major blockbusters to new voices. Without this investment in 
our authors, the diversity of books available to consumers will contract, as
 will the diversity of retailers, and our literary culture will suffer.

With three out of six of the big U.S. publishers supporting the Apple-approved agency sales model, Amazon isn’t likely to continue stealth removal tactics, especially with a Twilight-powered company like Hachette. How long can Bezos hold out before making a public statement?

Perhaps Jobs and Bezos are actually sitting in a room together, planning this all out and cackling before they release the hounds.

“I suddenly understood what fiction was for…I had to read books that I wouldn’t have necessarily read. I had to read them well and I had to read them in a short space of time. Back to back. Annie Proulx and ­Margaret ­Atwood and Beryl Bainbridge and Anne Michaels – boom, boom, boom. And I started to realise what fiction could be. And I thought, wow! You can be ambitious, you can take on the world – you really can.” – Andrea Levy, on judging the 1997 Orange Prize

“It’s important to note that we are not looking to the agency model as a way to make more money on e-books. In fact, we make less on each e-book sale under the new model; the author will continue to be fairly compensated and our e-book agents will make money on every digital sale. We’re willing to accept lower return for e-book sales as we control the value of our product–books, and content in general. We’re taking the long view on e-book pricing, and this new model helps protect the long term viability of the book marketplace.” – David Young, CEO of Hachette Book Group, in a letter to agents supporting Macmillan and the agency pricing model for e-books

“We are removing Amazon.com links from our website. Our authors depend on people buying their books and since a significant percentage of them publish through Macmillan or its subsidiaries, we would prefer to send traffic to stores where the books can actually be purchased.” – The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

“Forlorn as this hope may be, I can only fantasize that at least you might read my letter through and consider the pleasures and prestige of being an author at Faber, the last great family-owned independent publishing house in the western hemisphere.” – Faber editorial director Lee Brackstone in an open letter to Morrissey requesting he publish a memoir with Faber

While Amazon has yet to fully reinstate Macmillan titles on its website, another potential threat looms on the horizon for the online retailer. Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp. – the huge media conglomerate that owns HarperCollins – said about e-readers during a conference call yesterday that “devices and platforms are proliferating, but this clever technology is merely an empty vessel without any great content.” Further taking the side of the publishers in the Amazon vs. Macmillan battle, Murdoch had this to say (via All Things Digital):

We don’t like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99. They don’t pay us that. They pay us the full wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge. We think it really devalues books and it hurts all the retailers of the hardcover books. We are not against [inaudible] books. On the contrary, we like them very much indeed. It is low cost to us and so on. But we want some room to maneuver in it.

Murdoch also said that Apple has already agreed to “a variety of higher prices” for e-books, and that Amazon is ready to renegotiate pricing with News Corp. Will the clout of a publisher like HarperCollins force Amazon to allow higher prices? Will customers be willing to cough up more than $9.99 for an e-book, despite online protests? Or will the higher prices deter readers from investing in the high-priced Kindle at all?

One thing’s for sure: the publishing industry is being brought together by a common enemy, as demonstrated today at the America Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute. Galleycat reports that when Macmillan’s stand against Amazon was mentioned at the event, the company received an enthusiastic standing ovation.

Here are some literary links for your perusal:

• Amazon continues to fail: After removing all Macmillan titles from its site, the company’s own stock fell nearly 6% yesterday
• Salty Ink is throwing caution to the wind and judging books by their covers – from now until the end of the month, you can vote for the best Atlantic Canadian book cover
• Ricky Gervais reacts to the news that “flanimal rights” activists seem to have freed 12,000 copies of his new pop-up book
• Say hello to your old friends the Glass family: With new covers pre-approved by Salinger himself, Penguin will relaunch his backlist this June

Over the weekend a corporate brawl over e-book pricing lit up the Internet. After the U.S. publishing firm Macmillan announced that it would be raising prices of its e-books above Amazon’s $9.99 standard, Amazon responded by silently removing the “buy” buttons on all Macmillan titles. On Sunday, Amazon announced in a confusing note posted to its online Kindle forum – in which it claimed without irony that Macmillan has a ‘monopoly‘ on its own books – that it have will ‘have to capitulate.’

In a humorous round-up of the Amazon/Macmillan e-pricing hijinks, blogger and novelist John Scalzi details how Amazon failed over the weekend:

Amazon apparently forgot that when it moved against Macmillan, it also moved against Macmillan’s authors. Macmillan may be a faceless, soulless baby-consuming corporate entity with no feelings or emotions, but authors have both of those, and are also twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales, a fact which Amazon should be well aware of because we check our Amazon numbers four hundred times a day, and a one-star Amazon review causes us to crush up six Zoloft and snort them into our nasal cavities, because waiting for the pills to digest would just take too long.

These are the people Amazon pissed off. Which was not a smart thing, because as we all know, the salient feature of writers is that they write. And they did, about this, all weekend long. And not just Macmillan’s authors, but other authors as well, who reasonably feared that their corporate parent might be the next victim of Amazon’s foot-stompery.

Less than a week before Apple is expected to unveil its much-anticipated Tablet, Amazon has announced that it will open up the Kindle e-reader to software developers who can create custom apps à la iPhone. Starting next month, developers will be invited to take part in a beta program testing out the Kindle Development Kit, and the content itself will be available at the Kindle Store later in the year.

Developers will receive 70% of their app’s profits, minus a $0.15 “delivery fee,” according to Amazon. The release states that apps already in the works include restaurant guides from review company Zagat and word games and puzzles from Sonic Boom.

Users will, however, have to abide by Amazon’s guidelines, which prohibit “voiceover IP functionality, advertising, offensive materials, collection of customer information without express customer knowledge and consent, or usage of the Amazon or Kindle brand in any way.”

Quillblog was on the fritz on Friday, so here is what you missed:

“At the end of the day, people need to have the courage to speak out. The predatory pricing practice by Amazon has pulled the industry along, and the Federal Trade Commission should have paid attention. Ultimately the authors will pay out of their income. This is an attack on literature so Amazon can capture control of the industry. They think they will be the iTunes of literature. It’s a monopolistic play that has nothing to do with value for the consumer. It’s an interesting scam by a very large corporation and I think we should wake up. It hasn’t helped grow the market – it has concentrated the market in Amazon. It’s been 70 years since people got away with [such actions] because the anti-trust laws used to be enforced, but we didn’t have enforcement for eight years.” -   Bob Livolsi, founder of the ebookstore Books on Board, at a panel discussion at Mediabistro’s eBook Summit (via Mobylives)

“And don’t remind me of the conversation I once had with a prominent academic, who intended the phrase ‘But it’s so effortless …’ as an adverse comment on a novel. I simply couldn’t rant convincingly enough to ensure that particular book could win a small but useful prize. The narrative’s illusion of ease – and just you try creating an illusion of ease, matey – was too convincing. A parallel idiocy might involve refusing to applaud Derek Jacobi at the end of a performance, because he looked as if he wasn’t acting.” – A.L. Kennedy, on the Guardian’s blog

“My waitress tonight was a Trillium nominated novelist — what’s wrong with this picture?” – the OAC’s literature officer John Degen on Twitter

“As the debate progressed, it became clear that, although both poets know something of the current Canadian poetry landscape, both are conservative in conception and approach. Bok, who did not challenge the moderator’s depiction of him as an ‘experimental poet’ (in fact, he embraced it), is interested in equivalencies between poetic and scientific methodological composition, while the diffident Starnino prefers a poetry where emotion is to the garment what syntax is to the clothesline. Neither question the ideological construction of the structures they inhabit, and only barely did Starnino refer to Eunoia’s ’success’ as defined not by critique but by the market.” – Michael Turner on the Christian Bök/Carmine Starnino Cage Match of Canadian poetry

“I don’t for a second buy Bök/Starnino as the major critical dialectic in Canadian poetry. While one, generally, comes from a traditionalist mindset and the other is avant-garde, what matters is that both men are formalists at their core. The fact that Bök wants to write in genomic code and Starnino is into sonnets is secondary to the fact that the great professional theme for both is the use of constraint as a path to artistic freedom. A more representative conversation would be between the constrainers and the free-versers. But maybe the free-versers don’t have a spokesperson who’s talented or persuasive enough to hang with these two at an intellectual level.” – Jacob McArthur Mooney on his blog Vox Populism

If publishers were nervous about the future of the industry before, they’ve gotta be outright terrified now. Over the past few days, some of the most time-honoured practices of the business have been challenged or assaulted, and Amazon is leading the charge.

Late last week, the competition in the U.S. to offer the cheapest prices on e-books reached a new low with both Amazon and Barnes & Noble offering selected new titles for a mere $7.99. Though online retailers are absorbing the losses at the moment, there’s a strong possibility that the burden could shift to publishers. More important, however, is the fact that Amazon and its ilk have effectively shut publishers out of e-book pricing decisions altogether.

An equally pressing topic, meanwhile, is the question of who owns e-book rights to backlist titles. Since the vast majority of old author contracts contain no stipulations about e-book rights, authors and agents are awakening to the possibility of shopping those rights to firms other than the ones that publish the hard copies. Simon & Schuster found this out the hard way earlier this week when one of its authors, Stephen Covey, signed a deal with Amazon for exclusive digital rights to his perennial bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The move, which essentially cuts publishers out of the process altogether, is likely to catch on with a lot of other big-name authors if it goes unchallenged.

Clearly alarmed by what’s been happening, Random House took the ill-advised move of informing agents and authors that it retains exclusive digital rights to the vast majority of its backlist titles – a highly debatable assertion, and one that came off more like a threat than a friendly reminder.

According to a report in the Guardian today, however, Random House may not have a leg to stand on. The article points out that in 2002 Random House failed in an attempt to block e-book company RosettaBooks from selling digital versions of several of its backlist titles:

The ruling, upheld on appeal, found that copyright for books that were written before digital publishing existed remained with the author.

Arthur Klebanoff, head of RosettaBooks, secured Covey’s exclusive deal this week with Amazon. He said: “We are very clear about this, the author controls the rights unless it is specified otherwise, and that was settled by the courts years ago.”

Simon & Schuster, which took a knock over the Covey deal, was taking a softer stance than Random House but not accepting defeat. Adam Rothberg, a spokesman, would not comment on Covey specifically, but said in general terms it was the company’s “intention to publish the electronic editions to our backlist titles.”