The estimable Clay Shirky has written a lengthy piece called “Amazon, Publishers, and Readers” on medium.com saying, essentially, that an Amazon-dominated world would be an improvement over the Big Five “cartel”-dominated world of publishing we have today. This is an apples to oranges comparison. The Big Five are not nearly as broad a cartel as […]
This is a teamwork play that could really give Amazon a headache if they got together
I will admit that I have long been among those who believe that Amazon has what amounts to an enduring stranglehold on the book business. They have achieved a market share — which could be in the neighborhood of half the trade books sold if you combine print and digital versions — that is unprecedented […]
Publishers need to rethink their marketing deployments and tactics in the digital age to take advantage of their backlists
Well-articulated complaints about the way traditional publishing compares to self-publishing have recently been posted by two accomplished authors, one who writes fiction and one who writes non-fiction. These point to what most publishers really should already know. Some fundamental and time-honored truths about publishing need to be reexamined as we continue the digital transition. And […]
New data on the Long Tail impact suggests rethinking history and ideas about the future of publishing
For most of my lifetime, the principal challenge a publisher faced to get a book noticed by a consumer and sold was to get it on the shelves in bookstores. Data was always scarce (I combed for it for years) but everything I ever saw reported confirmed that customers generally chose from what was made […]
Subscription services for ebooks progress to becoming a real experiment
My long-held conviction that broad-based subscriptions for ebooks were not likely to work is partly based on facts that are now changing. It is still by no means a slam dunk that ebooks must go where Spotify has taken digital music and Netflix has taken the digital distribution of TV and movies, but it looks […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- …
- 16
- Next Page »