At the same time, Conducent sells the on-screen space to such advertisers as Amazon, an online bookstore, and Egghead, a software vendor.
In principle, customers hate the idea of price discrimination as Amazon, an online bookstore, discovered when it charged customers different prices for the same book.
In recent months, Amazon has been making a push to expand its offerings in China, first launching an online bookstore and then offering cloud storage services.
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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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.
"A lot of our customers come from North Africa, " Sany Naufal, founder of bookstore Antoine Online, told the recent ArabNet conference here in Beirut.
Borders Group, one of the two main brick-and-mortar bookstore competitors to online-only retailer Amazon , recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
They still like to go to a bookstore, while they also want everything available online.
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?
The bookstore giant is losing market share to Amazon's online sales and to e-book readers such as Amazon's Kindle.
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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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.
Previously, I was mostly discovering new books in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore even when, I am ashamed to admit, I often bought the books as ebooks online.
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