Most-favored-nation clauses are also an issue in the e-books case, where Apple sought to ensure that publishers gave the Apple online bookstore the best price available.
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But, interestingly, slightly more library e-books borrowers told Pew that when they want to find an e-book, the first place they look is an online bookstore -- not the library.
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In a recent editorial, Ray Kurzweil, futurist and Singularity Chancellor, compared the current university model to the bookstore model, suggesting that universities will be undermined by online the way that digital books undermined Borders.
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"A lot of our customers come from North Africa, " Sany Naufal, founder of bookstore Antoine Online, told the recent ArabNet conference here in Beirut.
Internal consolidation is another option: Bertelsmann is likely to buy out the rest of barnesandnoble.com, an online bookstore in which it has a 40% stake, and merge it with its wholly owned bol.com, which sells mainly in Europe.
The cyber bookstore may be a glowing beacon of the online revolution or just a freak of commerce.
Why should the corner bookstore be taxed, they ask, when an online bookseller gets to hawk their wares virtually tax free?
Borders Group, one of the two main brick-and-mortar bookstore competitors to online-only retailer Amazon , recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The bookstore giant is losing market share to Amazon's online sales and to e-book readers such as Amazon's Kindle.
At the same time, Conducent sells the on-screen space to such advertisers as Amazon, an online bookstore, and Egghead, a software vendor.
Nguyen Thanh Van An, 37, is the chief executive and founder of Internet bookstore Vinabook.com, a clone of China's online bookseller Dangdang.com--itself a version of Amazon.
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