The New York Times had a story on Tuesday morning about an advantage the Ford Motor Company had over its competitors at GM and Chrysler: it is still family-owned. As the Times explained, the family ownership was able to take a longer view than their competitors. In fact, we still don’t know whether the re-tooling […]
The “shift” speech
On May 28, I gave a speech called “Stay Ahead of the Shift: How Content-Centric Publishers Can Flourish in a Community-Centric Web World” at BookExpo America. From today (June 12) through Monday morning (June 15), we are able to show you the video of the speech (below). We have also put the slides and full […]
Director of “research” in a publishing house? Yes, more than 50 years ago!
Leonard Shatzkin was trained in printing. He left City College of NY a semester short of a degree in the social sciences to go to Carnegie Tech for three years to get a BS in Printing, which he received in 1941. His first job was as production manager at House Beautiful magazine when he and […]
How many more times for BEA?
I went to my first ABA (American Booksellers Association) Convention in Washington, DC in 1970. I had just written “The View from Section 111” for Prentice-Hall, about the New York Knicks’ first championship season, which was going to be published that October. Prentice-Hall threw a party for authors with a book coming that Fall, and […]
Two more Len Shatzkin anecdotes on publishing practice
Elisabeth Sifton has a long and thoughtful piece in the current issue of The Nation. I disagree with the fundamental premise — that the woes of the book business are primarily due to bad decisions or judgments by the leaders of the business rather than large forces that are changing the ground on which the […]