Although the value chain in trade publishing for the last century has, for the most part, kept retailers between publishers and consumers and kept publishers between retailers and authors, that has never been 100% true. Doubleday covered the whole value chain in the 1950s, when it not only owned the Doubleday Book Shops and the […]
White labeled specialty stores, not ebook superstores, are the future
One of the recurring characteristics of “change” is that the first iteration of something new looks a lot like what it is replacing. So it has been with ebooks and ebook retailing. The ebooks themselves have, for the most part, been the same as the print books except rendered on a screen instead of on […]
Oil in the bookstore ecosystem marshlands; danger ahead
I am finding an eerie similarity between the disastrous Gulf oil spill and the parlous state of America’s bookstores. In both cases, the forces are in place for a disaster that will play out over the coming months and years. And while the tragedy of what is happening in the Gulf is far more consequential to […]
Can the chains provide us with better small bookstores?
There is considerable concern among the trade publishing establishment about the future of brick-and-mortar stores. As well there should be. Retail stores provide the most efficient promotion opportunities for books: putting them in front of people poised to buy. They give clear signals about sales appeal by positioning and piles of stock of varying sizes; […]
First old publishing story: Brentano’s in 1962
My first real “job” in publishing was working as a sales clerk at Brentano’s flagship bookstore on 5th Avenue in the summer of 1962. I was deployed to the paperback department, which had opened only weeks before. In those days, almost all real consumer paperbacks were “mass-market”, rack-sized paperbacks. And almost all of what we […]