There’s a lot in this post that anticipates conversations we will have at Digital Book World 2016, coming up March 7-9 at the New York Hilton. “Transformation” will be an important theme at that event and nothing says “transformation” more than revenue sources you didn’t used to have. It was really 20 years ago that […]
What Oyster going down demonstrates is not mostly about the viability of ebook subscriptions
The news that the general ebook subscription offering Oyster is throwing in the towel was not really a surprise. The business model they were forced to adopt for the biggest publishers — paying full price for each use of a book with a threshold trigger at considerably less than a complete read while, at the […]
Market research used to be a silly idea for publishers but it is not anymore
When my father, Leonard Shatzkin, was appointed Director of Research at Doubleday in the 1950s, it was a deliberate attempt to give him license to use analytical techniques to affect how business was done across the company. He had started out heading up manufacturing, with a real focus on streamlining the number of trim sizes […]
Considering the very wide range of digital change topics that should be candidates for discussion at DBW 2016
The challenge for the book business for the past decade has been rapid and less-than-predictable changes in the ecosystem because of digital. There are two underlying shifts that fundamentally alter the ecosystem: people substituting ebook consumption for print book consumption and people substituting online purchase of printed books for buying them in stores. These two […]
Alternative paths to publishing proliferate but the path for authors most likely to be lucrative is still the oldest one
The Guardian reports that Big Five British publishers are aggressively courting authors to come directly to them rather than through agents. The specifics cited make this sound more like “toes in the water” than “a change in the value chain”. The Tinder Press division of Hachette is holding an “open submissions fortnight”. The editorial director […]