Before the early 1970s, wholesalers to the trade were local and carried a relatively small number of titles. Their main job was to back up bestsellers and local booksellers went direct to the publishers for just about everything else. Baker & Taylor was national, but focused on the library market. And Ingram was a small […]
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 […]
Publishers need to be clearer about their rights
Some of the recent conversation about ebook fair use sparked by the Kindle-and-audio incident made me recall that Joe Esposito and I had written about this problem in Publishers Weekly more than two years ago. We had a different catalyst for our thinking; at the time, we were wondering what the rules should be for […]
First old publishing story: Brentano’s in 1962
My first real “job” in publishing was working as a sales clerk at Brentano’s flagship bookstore on 5th Avenue in the summer of 1962. I was deployed to the paperback department, which had opened only weeks before. In those days, almost all real consumer paperbacks were “mass-market”, rack-sized paperbacks. And almost all of what we […]