The DoJ lawsuit and settlement, Amazon’s next giant step of growth in sales, the Business Week article on Amazon pushing publishers to allow them to print slow-movers on demand, and then this morning’s New York Times story about a book driven down to a price of zero on Amazon (presumably by an algorithm), combine to […]
Archives for April 2012
Things learned and thoughts provoked by London Book Fair 2012
This post contains a batch of observations from this year’s London Book Fair. Some of it recalled an experience from about 20 years ago. We’ll begin there. In the early 1990s, Microsoft was on a mission to get computer hardware manufacturers to install CD-Rom drives in new machines. Microsoft had a very simple motivation. Software […]
Jane Litte explains the DoJ suit very well, and I have a couple of points to add
Jane Litte at the DearAuthor blog has written a remarkably concise, clear, and cogent piece about the DoJ case. This whole paragraph is a link to it. That’s a signal. In fact, if this is a subject of high interest to you and you are not a lawyer, I would encourage you to read Jane’s post before you […]
After the DoJ action, where do we stand?
This post went up around midnight last night (Saturday, 4/14) in London, or between 6 and 7 NY time. I had been concerned about a part of it that has been edited below. If you read it before 5 pm today (Sunday, 4/15), you’ll not have seen this correction. And you’ll see some comments that […]
Random House maintaining a big field force while the industry wisdom is to cut
I was brought up to believe in the virtues of a large field sales force. One of Dad’s early successes in his career as Director of Research at Doubleday was when he analyzed sales rep effectiveness to advise the company about the optimum number of reps to keep when they combined sales forces that had […]