It is a safe contention that few people whose primary career motivation is “to get rich” go into book publishing. What attracts folks to our business are other life objectives. Over the six decades I’ve been interacting with publishing professionals, I have come to see that reality as a feature, not a bug. It is […]
A changing book business: it all seems to be flowing downhill to Amazon
Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle in 2007 was followed rapidly by other ebook systems — Kobo, Google, B&N’s Nook, and Apple’s iBook — and widely-available print-on-demand capabilities for printed books offered by Ingram (Lightning Print was already a decade old) and Amazon’s CreateSpace. Amazon had long exploited price as a weapon in the marketplace, discounting […]
Stability in the book marketplace does not mean commercial publishers continue to maintain their share
Publishing reporters doing wrap up stories occasionally call me for impressions. From those conversations I have gleaned that the prevailing impression of where the book business is now is of “stability”. The consensus about adult trade is that ebook sales have stalled or perhaps even receded, that print is strong, and that the big publishers […]
Ten Years Ago Amazon Started A Revolution and It Just Gave Me a Very Good Month
Ten years ago, Amazon released the first Kindle device. There had been electronic book reading devices before the Kindle and, indeed, the Sony ereader was actively in the market when Kindle arrived. (Others, like Rocketbook and Softbook, had perished for lack of interest.) Kindle and Amazon succeeded where others failed for several reasons. First and […]
Temperature check from two US CEOs at Frankfurt 2017
It is no surprise that the public remarks at Frankfurt by Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle and Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy contain gems worth pondering. Book publishing has been fortunate to have really smart people leading the biggest companies during our period of digital transition. The apparent collusion over the implementation of […]
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