The book business is in the early stages of its third great disruption in the past quarter century. The first two both changed the shape of the industry and created winners and losers across the entire value chain: touching every step from how … [Continue reading]
“The Family Business” is Ingram: the global infrastructure for the book industry
The global infrastructure for the book business that is not Amazon is owned and operated by the Ingram Content Group. In fact, a lot of the global infrastructure of the book business that is identified as Amazon is actually Ingram. And on top of … [Continue reading]
Amazon has done so many smart things that some of the best ones get forgotten
There's quite a bit of publishing about publishing going on in the next few weeks. British academic John B. Thompson has written a solid scholarly history of book publishing in the past quarter century or so called "Book Wars" that will publish … [Continue reading]
Remembering Jim Haynes, the man with more friends than anybody else
I met Jim Haynes at the first Frankfurt Book Fair I attended, in 1976. I would see him every year when I went back to Frankfurt and any other time I was in Paris, where Jim lived. I think I was one of his ten or fifteen thousand closest … [Continue reading]
Thoughts about what Covid and 2020 mean for book publishing
A team of independent publishing consultants with broad and deep experience in the industry have produced an excellent report on the effects of the past year's pandemic on the book publishing business called "COVID-19 and Book Publishing: Impacts and … [Continue reading]