My first real “job” in publishing was working as a sales clerk at Brentano’s flagship bookstore on 5th Avenue in the summer of 1962. I was deployed to the paperback department, which had opened only weeks before. In those days, almost all real consumer paperbacks were “mass-market”, rack-sized paperbacks. And almost all of what we […]
Archives for February 2009
Publishing and cash
There are few moments as entertaining at any BEA or Frankfurt than the moments I spend shooting the bull with David Godine. But I just read an interview with David that left me scratching my head. Early in the piece, David says: “First, we are privately held and cash flow is far more important than […]
Amazon’s competitive advantages: will they extend to an ebook world?
Will Amazon’s 70% or 75% or more market share of physical book sales online, plus the currently market-leading ebook reader, the Kindle, lead to a similar dominance of the ebook market as it grows? Despite the early lead of the Kindle, and the lock-ins provided by DRM, no interoperability, the largest selection of current titles, […]
TTS and audio “rights”
There are credible voices in the publishing world saying that the text-to-speech capability of Amazon’s new Kindle 2 constitutes a threat to the value of authors’ audio rights. The most extreme interpretation of the Authors Guild position is that protecting audio rights would extend to prohibiting parents from reading to their kids! But the most recent voice taking […]
Prices of ebooks and related matters
A great conversation broke out on the blog for Bob Miller’s new Harper imprint, HarperStudio I realized after I wrote a response that it summarized what might be useful thinking for publishers wrestling with the revenue potential of ebooks because it presents a frame, a way to think about it. Because it starts at the […]