As things evolve in an era of rapid change, it is human nature to assign credit or blame for any drastic alterations in circumstances. And so we have the book business, with its last remaining chain store behemoth, Barnes & Noble, in a period of obvious decline and presenting the clear possibility that the book […]
A changing book business: it all seems to be flowing downhill to Amazon
Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle in 2007 was followed rapidly by other ebook systems — Kobo, Google, B&N’s Nook, and Apple’s iBook — and widely-available print-on-demand capabilities for printed books offered by Ingram (Lightning Print was already a decade old) and Amazon’s CreateSpace. Amazon had long exploited price as a weapon in the marketplace, discounting […]
Amazon and the future of physical retail
There are two parallel conversations about the future of retail that are quite active. One is within the book business and it centers around what the future will be — and will there be one? — for Barnes & Noble. The other one is about the future of retail competitors to Amazon in the broader […]
Strategies to cut overheads in a shrinking book business make a lot of sense
An inexorable reality of today’s commercial book publishing world is that it is shrinking. Although there have been no obvious signs yet that actual long-form book reading itself has declined (even though that would seem a likely consequence over time of the changed ways we get our reading inputs), the self-publishing and indie segment of […]
Knowing which titles to work on is a challenge today that was not important 10 years ago
About 15 years ago, my friend Charlie Nurnberg, then the Sales VP at Sterling (which was, then, an independent publisher not yet bought by Barnes & Noble) threw me a challenge. “For years,” he said, “I got the B&N green-bar report [by which he meant an Excel spreadsheet] every Friday. I had 800 titles on […]
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