Ed Nawotka, the editor of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s online publication “Publishing Perspectives”, is running a series of pieces responding to his question “what was the most dramatic event in publishing in 2010?” Here’s the answer from The Shatzkin Files. The most dramatic event in publishing in 2010? That’s easy. It was the face-down between […]
Archives for November 2010
Some pre-Thanksgiving stuffing
A few things worthy of a pre-Thanksgiving comment have passed in front of my eyeballs in the past few days. 1. Sainsbury’s, one of the big supermarket chains in Britain, has announced that it will open a digital download store before Christmas. They’re starting with movies and music, but plan to expand to ebooks before […]
The sales paradigm needs to change
One of the functions of this blog is to predict important changes in the business just a bit before they happen. We think we were a bit ahead of the curve in seeing the ebook acceleration and in seeing the likely pressure on bookstore shelf space. Today it would seem that the next great pressure […]
Don’t drown walking across the river
An aphorism that I picked up years ago that crosses my mind frequently in my professional life is that “a six-foot tall man drowns walking across a river that’s an average of three feet deep.” The point is that aggregates and averages might mask important truths. I thought of this when I read the news […]
Why offshore ebook customers are so often frustrated
People of a certain age — mine — probably first encountered the world of rights as a content consumer with pop music in the 1960s. British albums, which came in sleeves that were flimsier cardboard than American album sleeves, routinely had 15 songs. American albums had 12. And the British would put songs out as […]