The core principles and workflows around marketing books really require change in the digital age, and perhaps more radical change than many people thought. The time-honored process was to somehow communicate knowledge of what was inside a book to book reviewers and bookstore buyers so they could decide whether it was suitable for their audience […]
Stay Ahead of the Shift: What Publishers Can Do to Flourish in a Community-Centric Web World
Speech given at BEA 2009. Focusing on the changes that will take place in publishing in the next 20 years. With a look back to the last 20 years, we are able to look forward and predict not only how publishing will be in the future, but also how information will be shared.
Where the Web Is Taking Us: The Inevitable Future and the Publisher’s Role In It
The basic premise under which we’re operating here, I’ll summarize for those of you have never heard or read my work before, is that horizontal, format-specific media entities are oh, so 20th century, and won’t work very deep into the 21st. The reason for that is the web, which almost forces vertical organization. Horizontal presentations across subject matter — like CBS, Random House, or The New York Times — were the products of a capital-intensive, limited-distribution universe
The Future of Books for Publishers and Booksellers
There is a big picture and a long arc within which our day-to-day activities are taking place. The 20th century consumer media were horizontal in their subject matter — that is, very broad — and format-specific. In the States, that means entities like CBS or NBC in television, The New York Times, or Random House. All of these companies provide content across the full range of human subject interests, but they pretty much stick to their formats: broadcast, newspapers, and books, respectively
The Digital State of Play in the US
…in the 21st century, the net is flipping this on us. The net tends to self-organize us by subject niche, so the eyeballs and human bandwidth are linked to the niches, which are vertical, not horizontal. And because web interaction is about file exchanges, format specificity is meaningless. The file can hold text, art or photographs or other graphics, animation, moving images, sound, games, or code that helps us combine, sort, or tag things