Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle in 2007 was followed rapidly by other ebook systems — Kobo, Google, B&N’s Nook, and Apple’s iBook — and widely-available print-on-demand capabilities for printed books offered by Ingram (Lightning Print was already a decade old) and Amazon’s CreateSpace. Amazon had long exploited price as a weapon in the marketplace, discounting […]
Temperature check from two US CEOs at Frankfurt 2017
It is no surprise that the public remarks at Frankfurt by Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle and Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy contain gems worth pondering. Book publishing has been fortunate to have really smart people leading the biggest companies during our period of digital transition. The apparent collusion over the implementation of […]
Agency pricing didn’t restrain Amazon; it strengthened them
Many, if not most, of the people in publishing houses I know have what they feel is a pretty clear picture of the changes we’re seeing in the business. There seems to be a strong consensus that the ebook share is leveling off or diminishing as opposed to print. And there is an enthusiasm about […]
Digital marketing and coping with Amazon are the two big challenges for publishers as we begin 2017
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 — […]
The latest marketplace data would seem to say publishers are as strong as ever
This post began being written a couple of weeks ago when I recalled some specific misplaced expectations I had for the self-publishing revolution and started to ponder why things happened the way they did in recent years. It turns out a big part of the answer I was looking for provides clarity that extends far […]