Like a marriage, relationships between people and companies are seldom made or broken on the back of one transaction or one kind of transaction. They are bigger and more complicated than that. That point was driven home in my house over the weekend by the dustup between Time Warner Cable and CBS, which resulted in […]
We’re getting SaaS-y, going Hollywood, and starting to plan Digital Book World 2013
It is hard to believe that we’re starting to plan the fourth annual Digital Book World conference, which will be held January 16-17, 2013 at the Hilton in New York City. But we are. The first DBW was held in 2010. Planning for it began the June before when David Nussbaum and Sara Domville of […]
What I Would Have Said in London, Part 2
This is the 2nd of a 4-part post spelling out what I would have said if I had appeared at the Annual General Meeting of the UK Publishers Association on Wednesday, April 28, and not been cancelled by a volcano. Part 1 set the stage, spelling out how much change can take place in 20 years. […]
Where the Web Is Taking Us: The Inevitable Future and the Publisher’s Role In It
The basic premise under which we’re operating here, I’ll summarize for those of you have never heard or read my work before, is that horizontal, format-specific media entities are oh, so 20th century, and won’t work very deep into the 21st. The reason for that is the web, which almost forces vertical organization. Horizontal presentations across subject matter — like CBS, Random House, or The New York Times — were the products of a capital-intensive, limited-distribution universe
The Future of Books for Publishers and Booksellers
There is a big picture and a long arc within which our day-to-day activities are taking place. The 20th century consumer media were horizontal in their subject matter — that is, very broad — and format-specific. In the States, that means entities like CBS or NBC in television, The New York Times, or Random House. All of these companies provide content across the full range of human subject interests, but they pretty much stick to their formats: broadcast, newspapers, and books, respectively