The publication of Brad Stone’s book about Amazon, “The Everything Store”, is the catalyst for a lot of new discussion about the topic most difficult for the book business to discuss. It is pretty much impossible to be in the book business without benefiting from Amazon’s market reach. But it is also pretty standard fare […]
The totality of the relationship is what matters
Like a marriage, relationships between people and companies are seldom made or broken on the back of one transaction or one kind of transaction. They are bigger and more complicated than that. That point was driven home in my house over the weekend by the dustup between Time Warner Cable and CBS, which resulted in […]
Explaining my skepticism about the likelihood of success for a general subscription model for ebooks
In a prior post, I observed that the apparently-successful subscription offerings for books were in niches. And I said I believed that a more general subscription model wouldn’t work for ebooks the way it has seemed to work for music (Spotify), movies and TV shows (Netflix), and audiobooks (Audible). By that I meant two things. […]
Two questions that loom over the trade publishing business
A lot of people in publishing would pay a lot of money to get a reliable answer to these two questions: When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop? Who will be left standing when it does? I won’t attempt to answer those two questions in this post. In fact, […]
Clever moves all around in the B&N and Amazon chess game
Readers who have been following publishing’s digital transition for two years or more will recall the situation in 2010 when five of publishing’s Big Six switched over from selling their ebooks on wholesale terms, by which the retailer sets the price to the consumer, to agency terms, by which the publisher sets a price that […]