The switchover from reading print to reading on screens, with the companion effect that increasingly the purchase of books is done online rather than in stores, is far advanced in the English-speaking world and especially so in the United States. In the past 12 months, the UK has begun to resemble the US market in […]
Archives for August 2012
DBW lets us look at ebook bestsellers by price, and things are revealed
Digital Book World unveiled its new ebook bestseller lists this morning. They put this effort together — I program the annual January conference for them; this work has almost nothing to do with me (although I’m over-generously credited with having provided “guidance”) — over the past couple of months working with Dan Lubart. Lubart owns […]
Some brief comment on news items from this week
Wiley announced a few months ago that they wanted to sell some of their most consumer-oriented lines of books (although, as Cader makes clear, what they announced they wanted to sell constituted only about 20% of the sales volume of the division that houses these titles.) The first sale under that initiative was announced this […]
Perhaps the revolution has reached an evolutionary stage
The dizzying pace at which US consumers were switching from print to digital couldn’t last forever. Based on the numbers being published by the AAP, with a huge assist in interpretation by Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch, it seems that the slowdown has become very noticeable in the past 12 months. Between late 2007 when […]
Going where the customers are might be an alternative to selling direct
The news that Faber in the UK has partnered with a company called Firsty Group to offer direct-to-consumer services to their distribution clients again calls the question about publishers selling direct. In my recent post about the likely outcome of the DoJ settlement being accepted by the Court, I said I was re-thinking my admonition […]