I had reason to learn recently that Ingram has 16 million individual titles loaded in their Lightning Source database ready to be delivered as a bound book to you within 24 hours, if not sooner. So every book coming into the world today is competing against 16 million other books that you might buy. That […]
Lots of Spanish speakers in the United States, but not so much of a book market for Spanish books
Somebody somewhere reported last month that the United States is the home country to the second largest number of Spanish-speakers in the world, after Mexico. Since I am speaking in Madrid to Spanish publishers at the end of May, that seemed like something I should learn more about. The US must be a market. The […]
Agents who come to Digital Book World will learn a lot they can immediately apply
The mission of the Digital Book World conference is industry education around digital change. There is a plethora of programming for this year’s event that will serve that purpose particularly well for literary agents. Of all the people in the industry, it would seem to me that agents would get the fastest and surest “return […]
Two pieces of news last week that foretell changes in the ebook marketplace
Two pieces of news this past week and how things play out with them might foretell some things about the direction of the ebook market. One news item is that reading on phones is really taking off. More than half of ebook consumers use their phones at least some of the time and the number that […]
No, the Big Five are not a cartel and it really ignores reality to label them as one
One of the best-attended breakout sessions of Digital Book World 2015 was the discussion called “Should Amazon Be Constrained, and Can they Be?” which shared the very last slot on the two day program. That conversation was moderated by veteran New Yorker journalist Ken Auletta, and included Annie Lowrey of New York Magazine, thriller author […]