We are working on a project in this office to “grid” the ebook world. We’ll have a hard time doing it in fewer than four dimensions. What we see as “major headings” are: 1) hardware/readingdevices, 2) software/platforms, 3) file formats, and 4) ebook retailers. And after we get that sorted out, we’ll start thinking about […]
Digital change: what’s an independent bookseller to do?
The question of how to plug the independent bookseller into the digital revolution is a knotty one. Nobody has really “solved” it. Two of the smartest guys in the UK, Francis Bennett and Michael Holdsworth, tried to tackle this question in a report for the Booksellers Association in a report published in 2007. While they […]
Ruminating about returns
The subject of eliminating returns seems to come up more and more frequently these days. Last week we were interviewing a major independent bookseller for our BISG “Shifting Sales Channels” project and they brought it up. In this case, they were complaining about the new “no returns” policy from HarperStudio. As I understand what the […]
Third old publishing story: tracking POS, and the explosion of backlist sales in the 1970s
In an earlier post, I told the story of Ingram’s introduction of the microfiche reader in the 1970s and what it did for backlist sales. There was another new technology introduced at the same time by the B. Dalton bookstore chain, based in Minneapolis and owned by the Dayton-Hudson Company. At this time, B. Dalton and […]
Riffing on Tamblyn’s “6 Things”, Part 1
Michael Tamblyn, the smart and dynamic leader of Booknet Canada who has performed minor miracles with the Canadian supply chain, gave a talk at his company’s tech forum a fortnight ago that has gotten a lot of deserved attention. It’s 30 minutes long, but it flies by and the presentation is great fun: very much […]