Week before last I was in Frankfurt observing that the rest of the world, including our close cultural neighbors in Europe, was going to start catching up to us in ebook uptake. A companion observation was that many book consumers in Europe are quite comfortable reading English. It is also true that many US publishers […]
Serious thoughts about the business (published by Barnes & Noble)
Daniel Menaker was not long ago the Executive Editor-in-Chief at Random House and writes knowledgeably about the state of play and state of mind inside Big Publishing today. His piece Redactor Agonistes is a psychological snapshot of a declining industry, a catalog of the frustrations that are increasingly common in an environment where, as hard […]
An ebook experiment stirs up conversation
The Wall Street Journal was the first to announce, on Monday, (behind a pay wall, but Google “Publisher Delays E-book Amid Debate On Pricing” and you’ll get it) that Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah was holding back the ebook publication of a new hardcover YA novel, Bran Hambric, scheduled for release this September. Raccah’s explanation to the […]
Google settlement opponents need to be careful how they win
The debate about the Google settlement, like most of any consequence or intellectual interest (what the government should do about health care or energy, for example) actually engages a wider range of knowledge than most of us have. But we feel comfortable having an opinion about what we should do about health care or energy […]
Is piracy something the book business needs to fear?
Motoko Rich was on the front page of Tuesday’s NY Times business section with a story headlined “Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web”. She documented growth in piracy at the front (a quote from David Young about increased vigilance from Hachette’s lawyers and from Wiley’s lawyer with stats about a 5-fold increase in […]