In some ways, I think this year’s Publishers Launch Frankfurt show kicks off the next era of digital change in global publishing. The US and other English-speaking markets have established clearly that immersive reading — fiction and narrative non-fiction — is easily ported to screens for most people. In the past 18 months, changes in […]
Hats off to Amazon
When the story of how Amazon came to dominate the consumer book business is written ten years from now, there will need to be a chapter entitled “September 6, 2012”. Of course, that was the day that Judge Cote approved the settlement agreed to by HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster and began the process […]
Full-service publishers are rethinking what they can offer
At lunch a few months ago, Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins, expressed dissatisfaction with the term “legacy” to describe the publishers who had been successful since before the digital revolution began. For one thing, he felt that sounded too much like “the past”. “We need to come up with a different term,” was his […]
Selling direct will become an essential capability for publishers to have
One question on which I have had a long-standing difference of opinion with most of my friends in the biggest publishing houses — or at least with their publicly-stated views — is whether it is sensible for them to sell direct to end consumers. That conversation was joined last week among three very smart people […]
From some perspectives, we are tipping right now and publishers’ metrics will show it
Sometimes, and it would seem quite often these days, the future comes faster than you expected it. Followers of this blog, and of my speeches before there was a blog (this one’s from 2001!), know I’ve long been expecting ebook reading to supplant print book reading for many people. I’ve been wrong about the timing. […]