Thinking more about ebooks and libraries and what big publishers should do
The reluctance of most big publishers to make ebooks available through library lending is a topic of widespread attention and concern. The AAP turned a chunk of its annual meeting over to the topic and...
View ArticleExtending the life of bookstores is critical, but devilishly difficult
I’ll admit that I would have thought a few years ago that by the time we got to the point when more than a third of unit sales for major houses had gone digital — and perhaps more than half for fiction...
View ArticleWhat’s the greater fear for publishers? Amazon or piracy?
Pottermore changed the game this morning. Congratulations to Charlie Redmayne, their CEO. The “aha” moment for me was when somebody on a listserv mentioned they’d bought Kindle editions of the seven...
View ArticleShould trade publishers start ditching their B2B imprints for a B2C world?
I spent last Friday at the On Copyright 2012 conference staged by my clients at Copyright Clearance Center. CCC is an organization dedicated to generating revenue for content creators from what is...
View ArticleRandom House maintaining a big field force while the industry wisdom is to cut
I was brought up to believe in the virtues of a large field sales force. One of Dad’s early successes in his career as Director of Research at Doubleday was when he analyzed sales rep effectiveness to...
View ArticleAfter the DoJ action, where do we stand?
This post went up around midnight last night (Saturday, 4/14) in London, or between 6 and 7 NY time. I had been concerned about a part of it that has been edited below. If you read it before 5 pm today...
View ArticleThe ebook marketplace is a long way from settled
When we put on conferences, we sometimes book speakers because of who they are, or who their company is, but we also do our best to make sure the content of their presentation will be useful to our...
View ArticleThe totality of the relationship is what matters
Like a marriage, relationships between people and companies are seldom made or broken on the back of one transaction or one kind of transaction. They are bigger and more complicated than that. That...
View ArticleNine places to look in 2014 to predict the future of publishing
The digital transition of the trade book publishing business, which I would date from the opening of Amazon.com in 1995, enters its 20th year in 2014. Here are some of the ponderables as we close out...
View ArticleFour of the big five have new deals with Amazon and only the biggest is still...
A reporter called earlier this week focused on what he figures are the upcoming negotiations over trading terms between Amazon and Penguin Random House. I had observed when Amazon was throwing sharp...
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