There’s quite a bit of publishing about publishing going on in the next few weeks. British academic John B. Thompson has written a solid scholarly history of book publishing in the past quarter century or so called “Book Wars” that will publish next month, focused on the arrival of ebooks and how publishers and the […]
What Oyster going down demonstrates is not mostly about the viability of ebook subscriptions
The news that the general ebook subscription offering Oyster is throwing in the towel was not really a surprise. The business model they were forced to adopt for the biggest publishers — paying full price for each use of a book with a threshold trigger at considerably less than a complete read while, at the […]
Three points worth adding to the excellent account of the Amazon story in The Everything Store
The publication of Brad Stone’s book about Amazon, “The Everything Store”, is the catalyst for a lot of new discussion about the topic most difficult for the book business to discuss. It is pretty much impossible to be in the book business without benefiting from Amazon’s market reach. But it is also pretty standard fare […]
Two questions that loom over the trade publishing business
A lot of people in publishing would pay a lot of money to get a reliable answer to these two questions: When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop? Who will be left standing when it does? I won’t attempt to answer those two questions in this post. In fact, […]