Before the early 1970s, wholesalers to the trade were local and carried a relatively small number of titles. Their main job was to back up bestsellers and local booksellers went direct to the publishers for just about everything else. Baker & Taylor was national, but focused on the library market. And Ingram was a small […]
Imprints in the 21st Century
HarperCollins announced a new imprint yesterday. And once again, we see no evidence that the big general trade publishers understand how to attack their new challenges in the 21st century. The difficulty for publishers, as readers of mine know, because I’ve written and spoken about it repeatedly, is that the “horizontal” infrastructure that has supported […]
Enhanced Ebooks, Part 2
This is the second post of a series which spells out a new ebook strategy for trade publishers, expressed in the form of a letter from the publisher to its authors. The first post — the beginning of the letter — expressed the publisher’s intention to invest in a database of digital assets to enhance […]
Amazon in the ebook age, reconsidered
Amazon made a huge leap to the front of the iPhone line. Putting a Kindle reader on the iPhone for free through the App Store enables shopping at Amazon’s Kindle store and then a direct download into the iPhone (or into the Kindle, or both!) This means reasonably good book merchandising and one-click. The reader […]
Publishers need to be clearer about their rights
Some of the recent conversation about ebook fair use sparked by the Kindle-and-audio incident made me recall that Joe Esposito and I had written about this problem in Publishers Weekly more than two years ago. We had a different catalyst for our thinking; at the time, we were wondering what the rules should be for […]