Big publishers have to be very happy about how things have been developing in the ebook world over the last six months or so. In that time, we have gone from a situation in which Kindle appeared to so totally dominate digital reading that Kindle-only publishing seemed an imminent threat to disintermediate publishers to one […]
Are free ebooks a good idea or not?
Kindle is certainly engendering a lot of confusion by billboarding the downloads of free ebooks as “sales.” That paradoxical scorekeeping was the lead for an article by Motoko Rich in The New York Times on Saturday that quoted a lot of people, some apparently disagreeing with each other, but none of them necessarily wrong. There […]
A coming new obsession: how to handle a smaller print-book business
Here’s a prediction that has almost no chance of being wrong. Every major player in the trade book industry is about to develop a new obsession: how must our business model change when we reach a level of ebook sales that is dynamically disruptive to the print book ecosystem? This might not be exactly a […]
DRM or not? a debate that won’t be over anytime soon
The one subject I didn’t touch in last week’s series of posts on ebooks was DRM: digital rights management, the software that controls what you can do with an ebook (or any other) file. This topic is so fraught with emotion and misplaced certainty that it has “third rail” aspects to it. So we tackle […]
A context in which to evaluate ebook strategies
This post is part of a growing set initiated by the Sourcebooks experiment holding back an ebook from simultaneous publication with an upcoming hardcover. It is the second (link to the first below) and will be followed by at least one more, as the conclusion of this post makes clear. To talk sensibly about the […]