I am getting ready to attend my first Digital Book World as a “civilian” (having programmed and moderated the first seven), Thinking about DBW entails recognizing how different the book publishing world today is from what I expected three or six years ago. Be that as it may, the big challenges for the industry — […]
Publisher margins today may be enviable, but it will be a big challenge to keep them that way
The major publishers have apparently worked themselves into a very strong commercial position at the moment with the transition to ebooks. I say “apparently” because the data that gives the most recent rise to that understanding — a presentation by HarperCollins of the current economics — is somewhat incomplete. What Michael Cader reported in Publishers […]
“Scale” is a theme everybody in publishing needs to be thinking about, so we’ve made it the focus of our next Publishers Launch Conference
The overarching theme of our upcoming Publishers Launch Conference at BookExpo America on May 29 is “scale”. I thank my PLC partner, Michael Cader, for urging that we label that as a core concern worthy of being the centerpiece for a day’s discussion. (With that nudge, I identified “scale”, along with “verticalization” and “atomization”, as […]
Seven-and-a-half days of conference programming coming up during 4 days in January
Blog posts have been scarcer for the past couple of months because I’ve been so engaged with a major responsibility: putting together what amounts to 7-1/2 days of conference programming that will be presented on four days next month in New York City. As most readers of this blog probably know, we’re responsible for the […]