My most recent post noted the rise of what I called “enterprise self-publishing”. It increasingly looks to me like enterprise-driven book publishing will become the dominant provider of books over the next decade. What distinguishes it is book publishing as a function in support of other efforts, rather than as a stand-alone business intended to […]
“Enterprise self-publishing” is coming: the third great disruption of book publishing since the 1990s
The book business is in the early stages of its third great disruption in the past quarter century. The first two both changed the shape of the industry and created winners and losers across the entire value chain: touching every step from how authors got money to how readers got books. Significant institutional players were […]
The end of the general trade publishing concept
My brilliant friend Joe Esposito has written a piece to explain why Penguin Random House would want to acquire Simon & Schuster. I have also been thinking about why PRH, or any of the other three of the “Big Five”, would want to acquire S&S. In fact, two of the three, Hachette and HarperCollins, have […]
Tamblyn sees a new era for bookselling that might be a new era for publishing as well
Michael Tamblyn, who heads up the Kobo global ebook operation, delivered a brilliant talk at the BISG Annual Meeting last week. The meat of his speech was to instruct publishers in very specific terms how to title, price, release, and identify their books in metadata in ways that really matter to sales and which are, […]
Medium publishes a book and gets some big PR
The New York Times carried a story on the front page of its Friday Business section about a book. This book is a novel entitled (appropriately for this piece) “The Big Disruption” by Jessica Powell. Of course, it is about Silicon Valley, which explains its positioning and why Times columist Farhad Manjoo was interested enough […]