I love and value The New York Times. But I have to admit that every time they write about something I know a lot about, it makes me wonder whether they’re complete and accurate when they write about the things I don’t know a lot about. There’s nothing wildly inaccurate in Motoko Rich’s “Week in Review” […]
Digital change: what’s an independent bookseller to do?
The question of how to plug the independent bookseller into the digital revolution is a knotty one. Nobody has really “solved” it. Two of the smartest guys in the UK, Francis Bennett and Michael Holdsworth, tried to tackle this question in a report for the Booksellers Association in a report published in 2007. While they […]
More on returns, thanks to Michael Cader
Michael Cader responded to my post on returns yesterday (Tuesday, 4/7) with some ruminations of his own. All of them were thoughtful and useful and triggered some additional thoughts from me. Here is Michael’s commentary with thoughts of my own interspersed. I will remain in italics throughout this post. I have posted Michael’s entire response […]
Epiphanies come and go
I was talking to one of the smart C-level people from a major house at a party last June at BEA in Los Angeles. He was very excited about what his company had accomplished. “We’ve set up a database and CMS so we can deliver a web page for every book a web page for […]
This ebook thing is just going to get more complicated
Adam Hodgkin at the Exact Editions blog posted a piece that explains the ebook strategies of Apple, Amazon, and Google in simple terms. Hodgkin’s piece really helps think things through, but I think his analysis is a bit oversimplified (which is part of why it helps think things through.) Hodgkin sees brilliance in Apple’s move not to […]