Big publishers have to be very happy about how things have been developing in the ebook world over the last six months or so. In that time, we have gone from a situation in which Kindle appeared to so totally dominate digital reading that Kindle-only publishing seemed an imminent threat to disintermediate publishers to one […]
Fleshing out The Times’s ebook story of May 17
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” […]
A few thoughts, some near heretical, about DRM
I got a call today from Laura Sydell of NPR in San Francisco to have a conversation about DRM. I found myself telling the story this way. From the beginning, there were multiple ebook formats, the leading ones being Adobe, Palm, and Microsoft Dot Lit for a time, with Mobi originally intended to be the […]
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