Amazon Struggles to Crack Publishing

Amazon.com Inc. has had lots of success in book retailing. But cracking the publishing business hasn’t been as easy.

Take one of Amazon’s biggest titles for fall, actress and director Penny Marshall’s memoir “My Mother Was Nuts.” In its first four weeks on sale, it has sold just 7,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan. By comparison, actor Rob Lowe’s memoir, 2011’s “Stories I Only Tell My Friends,” published by Macmillan’s Henry Holt & Co., sold 54,000 hardcover copies in its first four weeks.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Must-Reads from other Websites

Panos Mourdoukoutas

Why Apple Should Buy China’s Xiaomi

Paul Graham

What I Didn’t Say

Benjamin Bratton

We Need to Talk About TED

Mat Honan

I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass

Chris Ware

All Together Now

Corey S. Powell and Laurie Gwen Shapiro

The Sculpture on the Moon

About Voices

Along with original content and posts from across the Dow Jones network, this section of AllThingsD includes Must-Reads From Other Websites — pieces we’ve read, discussions we’ve followed, stuff we like. Six posts from external sites are included here each weekday, but we only run the headlines. We link to the original sites for the rest. These posts are explicitly labeled, so it’s clear that the content comes from other websites, and for clarity’s sake, all outside posts run against a pink background.

We also solicit original full-length posts and accept some unsolicited submissions.

Read more »