Writing about the lawsuit the DoJ has instituted against Apple and five leading publishers is very hard. It’s a big issue and doing it justice requires navigating two very large and complex bodies of knowledge: anti-trust law and the trade book publishing business. Whenever I write about it, I feel handicapped because I don’t know […]
A Mother’s Day Tribute to My Mom: Elky Shatzkin
I’ve written several times about my father’s life in the book business, which shaped quite a few careers, including mine. Here’s one. Andanother. This post, for Mother’s Day weekend, is about my father’s other great passion: my mother. Eleanor Oshry Shatzkin — Elky to everybody who knew her — was the first woman to graduate from the […]
Not all the victims of Hitler died before he did
To regular readers of this blog: I know I haven’t posted much lately, and this post has almost nothing to do with publishing (although there’s a book link in it!) I’m in London on my way to the Frankfurt Book Fair as I write it. I will resume more regular contributions to the dialogue about […]
Google settlement opponents need to be careful how they win
The debate about the Google settlement, like most of any consequence or intellectual interest (what the government should do about health care or energy, for example) actually engages a wider range of knowledge than most of us have. But we feel comfortable having an opinion about what we should do about health care or energy […]
Verticalization in action
Michael Wolff has written in Vanity Fair about Politico, which demonstrates many of the priciples of verticalization that I have written about often on this blog. He begins with a summary of a startlingly prescient piece Michael Crichton wrote in the fourth issue of Wired Magazine. Wolff writes: “In the fourth issue of Wired magazine, in […]