Amazon has three pretty powerful things going for them, and two are entirely their own doing. Number one: Amazon is, by far, the most book-industry-focused company that is actually active in endeavors much larger than the book business. Barnes & Noble and Ingram are just as focused, but they really don’t go beyond the book […]
Can big publishers actually do tech and make books at the same time?
Something caught my eye this week that has been very little commented upon elsewhere: the news that Hachette Book Group developed an app-making capability that they are now licensing out. Their first customer was Round Table Companies, a book packager. I found this striking because big book publishers are not generally known for developing technology; […]
Kobo’s new deals propel them into the top tier of global ebook competitors
The week I spend each year at the Frankfurt Book Fair is always the most stimulating week of my professional year. The concentration of the best thinkers and most powerful people in publishing always seems to lead me to a new burst of understanding about our global publishing world, particularly in these times of rapid […]
Publishing is living in a world not of its own making
A big ebook shoe dropped on Sunday. It dropped on Kobo first. And it has nothing to do with Borders. Kobo just delivered a new iOS (that’s Apple’s operating system for iPad and iPhone) app that no longer contains the direct link to the Kobo bookstore within it. That means that buying new Kobo books […]
Merchandising ebooks is a problem not really solved yet
I have always been in the process of reading at least one book since I was about 8 years old. When I was a little kid, I’d find them in the house (Dad was in publishing) or at the library in my home village of Croton-on-Hudson or in the school library. Sometimes extraordinary measures delivered […]