Employment

Amazon is acquiring one of its competitors today, announcing that the e-commerce giant has bought The Book Depository International. The Book Depository is a UK-based online bookseller offering over six million books for delivery worldwide. Financial terms of the deal are not disclosed. So why buy this company? The Book Depository, is one of the fastest growing booksellers in Europe. The retailer has over a million customers and also comes with a Dodo Press imprint and a fulfillment centre in Gloucester, UK. The company ships its books free of charge, worldwide, to over 100 countries. Amazon currently offers international sites in Germany, Japan, Austria, Canada, China, France, the UK and also has a Spanish-site for Spanish-speaking countries. But the company no doubt wants to expand beyond these countries and The Book Depository expands its reach with an established customer base in Europe and a fulfillment center. It’s unclear from the release if The Book Depository will become an...

This guest post is by Lucas Kleinschmitt of German Efficiency . If you’re in the blogging business, not being a native English speaker can be tough. The market in your home country will often be small, there may not be a culture of buying things online, and it can be difficult to find guest posting opportunities in your native language. Image copyright NASA Goddard Photo and Video, licensed under Creative Commons On the other hand, blogging in English seems like an equally bad idea at first glance: How are you supposed to compete with an army of bloggers whose command of the English language greatly exceeds your own? Even if your English is really good, you will probably need to pay a professional editor to avoid the occasional English-as-a-second-language errors. I admit it: all that sounds rather intimidating. But don’t despair! Fortunately, we “internationals” enjoy one huge, unfair advantage for which every American, Australian, or British blogger should envy us. In fact, all the h...