I think just about everybody has fun at Digital Book World, but it is hard to have more fun there than I do. It’s damn near a year of work coming together over a couple of days with dozens of smart speakers making me personally look good for putting them on the program. So they […]
Archives for January 2012
Remaking an Industry: What publishers need to be thinking about in 2012
Mike Shatzkin at DBW2012 View more presentations from The Idea Logical Company To kick off the 3rd annual Digital Book World extravaganza, I wanted to do a quick review of what I think are the things publishers need to be thinking about in 2012. This is a checklist; I’m not going to take much time […]
Learning some things at ABA’s Winter Institute
The American Booksellers Association held their seventh annual “Winter Institute” in New Orleans this year, and it took place last week. When I had a meeting at Frankfurt in October with the ABA’s Chief Executive Officer, Oren Teicher, to recruit him to speak at Digital Book World 2012 (which he will do this coming week), […]
Show me the data!
One thing we try to do at Digital Book World is to present our audiences with useful, relevant, and, when we can, original data. It is a familiar complaint in our industry that we drive blind. Part of that is due to the sheer diversity and granularity of the “book business”. And another part is […]
Some things that were true about publishing for decades aren’t true anymore
Back when my father, Leonard Shatzkin, was active with significant publishers — the quarter century following World War II — he observed that very few books actually took in less cash than they required. That is not to say that publishers saw most books as “profitable”. Indeed, they didn’t. They placed an overhead charge of […]