My professional background — indeed, most of my life that isn’t family, friends, baseball, and politics — is trade publishing: the publishing that is intended for consumers and which got its name becaiuse it has been transacted primarily through “the trade”: bookstores. But this past week I spent two full days with the Publisher Advisory […]
A brilliant Conference Council helps make a great Digital Book World
We had a very successful debut annual conference for Digital Book World last January, even though we didn’t conceive the idea until June, put together a group of helpers (which we now call our Conference Council) until July, or draft the initial program until August. This year we’re way ahead of that schedule. We’ve put […]
Practical and ethical challenges posed by digital content delivery
The New York Times published two apparently unrelated articles over the weekend which address questions raised by the rise of digital content creation and distribution. One was an op-ed piece in the Saturday paper by author Mark Aronson about the challenge of collecting the permissions necessary to include copyrighted material in enhanced ebooks. On Sunday, the […]
With new opportunities come new challenges
This blog and my speeches contain frequent references to what we see as the big shifts the book publishing industry, and some publishers more than others, are feeling. The horizontal and format-specific product-centric media of the 20th century are inexorably yielding to the vertical and format-agnostic community-centric delivery environment for content that will soon predominate. In […]
Copyright Clearance Center could become more important in the digital future
One of the findings of our StartWithXML project was that book publishers can expect the market for pieces of their content and databases of their content to grow, even while the market for books themselves may not. In the context of our XML research, that is part of the reason publishers need to tag their […]