Company transformation is a major theme at this year’s Digital Book World conference. By “transformation” we mean substantial changes in a company’s business model or core competencies or revenue streams. We found eight worthy companies to speak on this subject. Six of them — Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Ingram, Quarto, Rodale, Sourcebooks, and Wiley — are […]
Frankfurt is still vast, but it seems to be getting smaller
I’ve spent more than half-a-year of my life in Frankfurt, one week at a time. My first Fair was 1976 so this would have been my 39th if I attended them all. I think I missed two, so that’s 37. I love it and I get enormous commercial benefit from it. I can’t understand people […]
The future of bookstores is the key to understanding the future of publishing
One of the subjects we have been probing for a long time is the inevitable impact that increased purchasing of books online would have on the shelf space at retail and what that would mean to trade publishers. (You’ll see that this speech that is well more than a decade old also says publishers are […]
But what if it gets really easy to deliver apps or enhanced ebooks?
This is an unusually brief post today, but some worthy observations don’t require long explanations. I wrote nearly 18 months ago about my concern that publishers’ interest in enhanced ebooks would bring on a repeat of the commercially disastrous CD-Rom era of the mid-1990s. Of course, since the CD-Rom era, a lot has changed. * […]
BEA will be a shame to lose, but can it be saved?
Dinner Saturday night. 12 of us. Three spouses who had no particular interest in the BEA. Eight of us with one interest or another in the book business, but no possibility of personally being an exhibitor. And one publishing company CEO with a stand. Of course, I got my money’s worth. I got in free as […]