In the words of Emily Litella, the Saturday Night Live character of the 1970s invented by Gilda Radner, “never mind.” I’m referring to my post about “debut pricing” from earlier this week. It can’t be done; at least not easily and at least not immediately. The challenges we face require a continuing conversation and crowds […]
Ebook growth explosive; serious disruptions around the corner
The news about trade ebook sales growth continues apace. The IDPF has just said that sales in June 2009 were up 136% over June a year ago. Calendar year sales to date are up about 150% over 2008. Anecdotal information from big trade houses suggests that ebook sales are approaching 3% of total sales. But […]
Aside from the publishers: how the other stakeholders fare as ebook adoption continues
In three prior posts, we’ve explored the initial conversation that surrounded the announcement that Sourcebooks would delay the ebook release of Bran Hambric; sketched out what we think are the four stages of ebook adoption; and looked at how publishers see the early “establishment” stage, which is where we are now. This post is about the […]
Ebook complexity: good news for publishers
We are working on a project in this office to “grid” the ebook world. We’ll have a hard time doing it in fewer than four dimensions. What we see as “major headings” are: 1) hardware/readingdevices, 2) software/platforms, 3) file formats, and 4) ebook retailers. And after we get that sorted out, we’ll start thinking about […]
The Digital State of Play in the US
…in the 21st century, the net is flipping this on us. The net tends to self-organize us by subject niche, so the eyeballs and human bandwidth are linked to the niches, which are vertical, not horizontal. And because web interaction is about file exchanges, format specificity is meaningless. The file can hold text, art or photographs or other graphics, animation, moving images, sound, games, or code that helps us combine, sort, or tag things