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 […]
Building a new-fangled conference program the old-fashioned way
There is certainly more than one way to build a conference program. I have been putting them together since long before I learned about the concept of “crowd-sourcing”. I’m a bit of a plowhorse about some things so the Digital Book World conference program comes together pretty much the same way as the first digital […]
Where will bookstores be five years from now?
Upton Sinclair famously said that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” I keep putting facts about publishing’s commercial realities that I think most of the smart people running things accept together with forecasts for the future that I think most of the […]
Making Information Pay 2010: Points of No Return
We have a program packed with information which we always strive for here at Making Information Pay. This conference, as usual, is about what’s changing in our publishing world right now and how we should address it. Before I walk us through this morning’s program, I want to give you two snapshots of the future, first as I see it and then as it was reflected in the answers you and others gave to the survey that tied into this year’s event.
Points of No Return: Making Information Pay for 2010
This is the third year in a row that we’ve put together the Making Information Pay conference for the Book Industry Study Group, in conjunction with Ted Hill of THA Consulting. We’ve repeated the formula we’ve applied for the past two years, doing an industry survey on the conference theme to provide some additional insight. This year’s conference […]