Two examples of the shift from horizontal media to vertical have caught my attention in the last week, although both of them have been around for a while. Monday’s “Online Media Daily” has a story about AOL hiring laid-off journalists for its new(ish) cluster of vertical channels. There are 70 such vertical channels already launched, […]
Archives for March 2009
Third old publishing story: tracking POS, and the explosion of backlist sales in the 1970s
In an earlier post, I told the story of Ingram’s introduction of the microfiche reader in the 1970s and what it did for backlist sales. There was another new technology introduced at the same time by the B. Dalton bookstore chain, based in Minneapolis and owned by the Dayton-Hudson Company. At this time, B. Dalton and […]
More on the Google settlement
OK, so what I thought I had figured out earlier isn’t so simple. In a prior post, I “discovered” (for everybody) that it is likely that the biggest revenue opportunity in the pile of books being scanned by Google would be the republishing possibilities among the orphans. I posited that with all those books about […]
The University of Michigan Press announcement
Day before yesterday (Tuesday), the University of Michigan Press announced that it was no longer doing press runs of scholarly monographs. Henceforth, says the announcement, 50 of the 60 monographs published annually will be done “only as digital editions.” What a retro way to position a progressive decision! Publishing with no offset press run (or […]
Riffing on Tamblyn’s “6 Things”, Part 1
Michael Tamblyn, the smart and dynamic leader of Booknet Canada who has performed minor miracles with the Canadian supply chain, gave a talk at his company’s tech forum a fortnight ago that has gotten a lot of deserved attention. It’s 30 minutes long, but it flies by and the presentation is great fun: very much […]
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