The tactic of keeping the ebook off the market to “protect” hardcover sales, first executed by Sourcebooks this month on behalf of Bran Hambric, is becoming more widespread. At the same time that Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol was released simultaneously in cloth and digital, Ted Kennedy’s posthumous True Compass was released in print with the ebook withheld. […]
Archives for September 2009
Beast Books: a sign of times to come
The story in today’s New York Times about the new Daily Beast publishing imprint created by Perseus obviously didn’t hit everybody else the way it hit me. I think it is really important news. It is also a smart approach. And I think it is a harbinger of many things to come. The two things that […]
Why publishers need to understand brand
In the Internet world, brands will be more important than they’ve ever been before. Why? Because as the number of choices available to anybody seeking anything proliferate, brand is the shortcut that allows choices to be made quickly and reliably. And the Internet does nothing better than presenting us with more choices for any quest […]
Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change
Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change Every time I read a story about why newspapers are failing that doesn’t mention the role of aggregation and curation in their troubles, it reminds me that something very fundamental is being missed, even by very sophisticated observers. Aggregation is one of the […]
Serious thoughts about the business (published by Barnes & Noble)
Daniel Menaker was not long ago the Executive Editor-in-Chief at Random House and writes knowledgeably about the state of play and state of mind inside Big Publishing today. His piece Redactor Agonistes is a psychological snapshot of a declining industry, a catalog of the frustrations that are increasingly common in an environment where, as hard […]