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. * […]
Conceiving issues that will gestate in the next nine months; planning for 2012 Digital Book World
The fact that Publishers Launch Conferences will stage half-a-dozen or more events before our next big multi-day Digital Book World blowout next January doesn’t change the DBW calendar. Now is the time of year when we have to start thinking about what the big issues will be at the turn of the year so we […]
Upstream and downstream developments crowd publishers’ space
I had breakfast last summer with one of the titans of 20th century publishing who is now in his senior years running his own smaller operation. He’s a notorious non-techie. When we talked, he was trying to come to grips with what the problem for publishers was with this digital transition. From his perspective, publishing […]
All publishers and book retailers are global now
One of the key building blocks of my career was the six years I spent working on a program called “Publishing in the 21st Century” with Mark Bide and a team at Vista Computer Services (now Publishing Technologies) led by then-Chairman Denis Bennett, John Wicker (now at Tata Consulting Services), and Martyn Daniels (now at Value-Chain […]
Don’t drown walking across the river
An aphorism that I picked up years ago that crosses my mind frequently in my professional life is that “a six-foot tall man drowns walking across a river that’s an average of three feet deep.” The point is that aggregates and averages might mask important truths. I thought of this when I read the news […]