Today’s post is about Ted Williams, the baseball player who might have been the greatest hitter who ever lived. There’s no attempt here to make the piece accessible to people who neither know nor care about baseball so, if you came to the blog for publishing or digital change today, please come back for the […]
Archives for July 2010
It isn’t wise to draw lines in the sand that ultimately can’t be defended
Apologies in advance for a much-longer-than-usual post. It is not like the publishers haven’t seen the ebook royalty fight coming. On a panel he and I were on together in March of 2009, John Sargent, the Chairman and CEO of Macmillan, identified ebook margins as the critical issue for publishers going forward. Even though ebook […]
Lots going on; no single topic today
I find myself with a lot of pages open on my web browser. Even before Amazon’s announcement yesterday about ebooks passing hardcovers in sales this past quarter, there has been a lot going on. There had been some suggestions, which I never bought into, that ebook sales were slowing in 2009. (Is this a meme […]
Publishing conversation at the ballpark
The very nice people of Tata Consulting Services entertained a group of publishing executives at Yankee Stadium on Friday night in a luxury box behind first base. This was an ideal way to see an historic evening at the ballpark on a very hot night (the box is air conditioned and opening the big window […]
For big publishers: what scales and what doesn’t?
The last post I did got more attention than anything on the blog in quite some time, but for somewhat different reasons than I intended. My central point about what increasingly common ebook growth predictions would mean for brick-and-mortar sales (that they’d decline sharply over the next five years) was that it diluted the core […]