There are some days that the news I see just makes me feel so good about the programming we’re doing for this year’s Digital Book World. One of those days was earlier this week when the news pointed directly to three items on our program. As I wrote in the last post, we have an entire […]
Books as brands and the opportunities to sell book-branded merchandise
There’s a lot in this post that anticipates conversations we will have at Digital Book World 2016, coming up March 7-9 at the New York Hilton. “Transformation” will be an important theme at that event and nothing says “transformation” more than revenue sources you didn’t used to have. It was really 20 years ago that […]
What Oyster going down demonstrates is not mostly about the viability of ebook subscriptions
The news that the general ebook subscription offering Oyster is throwing in the towel was not really a surprise. The business model they were forced to adopt for the biggest publishers — paying full price for each use of a book with a threshold trigger at considerably less than a complete read while, at the […]
Market research used to be a silly idea for publishers but it is not anymore
When my father, Leonard Shatzkin, was appointed Director of Research at Doubleday in the 1950s, it was a deliberate attempt to give him license to use analytical techniques to affect how business was done across the company. He had started out heading up manufacturing, with a real focus on streamlining the number of trim sizes […]
Considering the very wide range of digital change topics that should be candidates for discussion at DBW 2016
The challenge for the book business for the past decade has been rapid and less-than-predictable changes in the ecosystem because of digital. There are two underlying shifts that fundamentally alter the ecosystem: people substituting ebook consumption for print book consumption and people substituting online purchase of printed books for buying them in stores. These two […]