The era of digital change in publishing has given rise to a slew of service propositions to help publishers with their new infrastructure needs. This is both essential and also nothing new. It has always been necessary for publishers to execute on core needs by getting help at scale. There was a time when publishers […]
Anybody Press is the new member of the Big Six (for ebooks, at least)
Bowker reported last week that 12% of the ebooks being bought now are self-published. There was skepticism about the methodology from The Digital Reader and Good e-Reader says Bowker’s data should be taken “with a grain of salt”. But the exact number doesn’t matter; the trend does. The share of the consumer ebook dollar going […]
What I was thinking when I said that wild stuff
At our Publishers Launch Conference on the Wednesday of BEA, Michael Cader and I introduced a new feature we think will become regular at our events: a candid 1-on-1 conversation between us. It went well. In fact, it went so well that what reads like a pretty damn accurate verbatim account of much of it […]
Further ruminations about the complex notion of scale in publishing
Our May 29 conference is built around the theme of “scale” in our business, which means something different than it did a very short time ago. Usually “using scale” means “employing the competitive advantages of size” but it can also be leveraging efficiency; the key beneficial characteristic of scale is that unit costs decline with […]
Unbundling in the book business: the fourth big trend
A few weeks ago, I wrote that there are three big forces driving the future of publishing: scale, verticalization, and atomization. I was wrong. I had forgotten my own blogpost from last September when I identified another trend that belongs with the first three: “unbundling”. The book business, in the trade segment I follow most […]