We (Ted Hill of THA Consulting and I) are working with BISG again this year on their Making Information Pay conference. Last year we did a project on “Experimentation and Innovation” where we used both an online survey and interviews to surface the issues we captured in a research paper and then formed the backbone […]
If you could fix something, what would you fix?
The question asked on an email list of digerati-types was: “On the trade side of the business, what are some of the unmet challenges, the unsolved conundrums, at the intersection of books & technology? If you could fix something, what would you fix?” 1. Enhanced ebooks. Nobody seems to have developed a standardized way to […]
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 […]