This is the last of a 4-part series describing what I was intending to say to a live audience at the Publishers Association in London on April 28. In Part 1, I tried to make clear that a lot can happen in 20 years, which is the prediction arc for the first three posts. In […]
Serious thoughts about the business (published by Barnes & Noble)
Daniel Menaker was not long ago the Executive Editor-in-Chief at Random House and writes knowledgeably about the state of play and state of mind inside Big Publishing today. His piece Redactor Agonistes is a psychological snapshot of a declining industry, a catalog of the frustrations that are increasingly common in an environment where, as hard […]
A Little Ado About Something
The transition from print to digital is going to be a continual lesson in branding for publishers and in merchandising for retailers. I got a dose of that trying to make use of modern technology to deal with an old common problem last week. I knew two or three weeks before that I was going […]
“Debut pricing” for ebooks: a better idea than withholding them
Three weeks ago, the community had a big discussion about the timing of ebook releases which was triggered by Dominique Raccah’s announcement that Sourcebooks would hold back the ebook of Bran Hambric for some period after the hardcover release. The expressed concern was to insulate the $28.95 hardcover from the price competition currently taking place […]
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 […]