There’s little doubt that the digital (r)evolution, to the degree it is measured by the shift by consumers from reading on paper to reading on a screen, has plateaued, at least temporarily. The most recent article in PW on the subject spells out that some publishers have even seen their digital sales decline, although always […]
Anybody Press is the new member of the Big Six (for ebooks, at least)
Bowker reported last week that 12% of the ebooks being bought now are self-published. There was skepticism about the methodology from The Digital Reader and Good e-Reader says Bowker’s data should be taken “with a grain of salt”. But the exact number doesn’t matter; the trend does. The share of the consumer ebook dollar going […]
John Locke and S&S show us another kind of deal we can expect to see again
OK, now we know another new paradigm for book publishing in the digital age with the announcement of self-publishing author John Locke’s new deal for print distribution with Simon & Schuster. The big publishers have said for a while now that they won’t be signing up books for print rights only. That makes sense, up […]
The old publishing value chain got twisted a bit last week
Although the value chain in trade publishing for the last century has, for the most part, kept retailers between publishers and consumers and kept publishers between retailers and authors, that has never been 100% true. Doubleday covered the whole value chain in the 1950s, when it not only owned the Doubleday Book Shops and the […]
It’s official: putting books in stores is a subsidiary right
The headline in a number of places was that Amazon was now aggressively going after exclusives for their Kindle line and actually bid against the publishers for Amanda Hocking’s trade books. The enabling component, as reported in Publishers Lunch, was that Houghton Harcourt is now Amazon’s trade book distributor. Except please don’t call it that. […]