I got a call today from Laura Sydell of NPR in San Francisco to have a conversation about DRM. I found myself telling the story this way. From the beginning, there were multiple ebook formats, the leading ones being Adobe, Palm, and Microsoft Dot Lit for a time, with Mobi originally intended to be the […]
The Book Business Ain’t The Music Business
Len Vlahos of the ABA is the latest to take on the noble but very difficult task of encouraging independent booksellers in the digital age. Independent booksellers face a challenge similar to that of publishers adjusting to the change we’re facing: the skill sets and predelictions that are useful for what they’ve been doing don’t […]
Shifting Sales Channels, and What Publishers Are Doing About Them
We (Ted Hill of THA Consulting and I) are working with BISG again this year on their Making Information Pay conference. Last year we did a project on “Experimentation and Innovation” where we used both an online survey and interviews to surface the issues we captured in a research paper and then formed the backbone […]
If you could fix something, what would you fix?
The question asked on an email list of digerati-types was: “On the trade side of the business, what are some of the unmet challenges, the unsolved conundrums, at the intersection of books & technology? If you could fix something, what would you fix?” 1. Enhanced ebooks. Nobody seems to have developed a standardized way to […]
Second old publishing story: the first great book supply chain tech disruption
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 […]