An ebook of the first two years of The Shatzkin Files is now available and will be linked for the forseeable future from our left nav bar. This post is the introduction to the ebook, which explains how it came about. My friend, Joe Esposito, first told me about blogs in the early part of […]
Most dramatic publishing event of 2010? Introducing agency pricing!
Ed Nawotka, the editor of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s online publication “Publishing Perspectives”, is running a series of pieces responding to his question “what was the most dramatic event in publishing in 2010?” Here’s the answer from The Shatzkin Files. The most dramatic event in publishing in 2010? That’s easy. It was the face-down between […]
Some pre-Thanksgiving stuffing
A few things worthy of a pre-Thanksgiving comment have passed in front of my eyeballs in the past few days. 1. Sainsbury’s, one of the big supermarket chains in Britain, has announced that it will open a digital download store before Christmas. They’re starting with movies and music, but plan to expand to ebooks before […]
Insights about the current state of the ebook market
I had a chance this week to chat with a very smart person who works for a company that does a lot of business with book publishers. Some things articulated themselves in that conversation — one of my favorite collaborators, Mark Bide, has often observed that we “learn a lot by talking” — that seemed […]
Three new ebook platforms nearing their debut
A year ago — even six months ago — it seemed like Amazon and its Kindle device had an insurmountable advantage in the ebook device and platform competition. Despite our admonition that Amazon’s dominance of ebooks was much more fragile than their dominance in online print bookselling, even we were impressed and sometimes daunted by […]