The Wall Street Journal wrote last week about what we have been concerned about for some time: how hard it will be for publishers to sustain book prices as supply (of books) rises faster than demand because of all the self-publishing being done. WSJ built their story around John Locke, whose thrillers are 99 cents […]
Archives for April 2011
Conceiving issues that will gestate in the next nine months; planning for 2012 Digital Book World
The fact that Publishers Launch Conferences will stage half-a-dozen or more events before our next big multi-day Digital Book World blowout next January doesn’t change the DBW calendar. Now is the time of year when we have to start thinking about what the big issues will be at the turn of the year so we […]
I thought I was writing a blog, but it turns out I wrote a book!
An ebook of the first two years of The Shatzkin Files is now available and will be linked for the forseeable future from our left nav bar. This post is the introduction to the ebook, which explains how it came about. My friend, Joe Esposito, first told me about blogs in the early part of […]
It will be hard to find a public library 15 years from now
I spoke last week to a group in Montreal convened by the English-language Publishers of Quebec and the Quebec Writers Association in a small auditorium at the Atwater Library. The Atwater Library is a private library with very limited government funding which is more than 100 years old. (The Globe and Mail article that quoted […]
It’s official: putting books in stores is a subsidiary right
The headline in a number of places was that Amazon was now aggressively going after exclusives for their Kindle line and actually bid against the publishers for Amanda Hocking’s trade books. The enabling component, as reported in Publishers Lunch, was that Houghton Harcourt is now Amazon’s trade book distributor. Except please don’t call it that. […]