The challenge for the book business for the past decade has been rapid and less-than-predictable changes in the ecosystem because of digital. There are two underlying shifts that fundamentally alter the ecosystem: people substituting ebook consumption for print book consumption and people substituting online purchase of printed books for buying them in stores. These two […]
The Digital Book World program this year covers the waterfront of the digital transition for book publishing
(This is a longer-than-usual Shatzkin Files post reviewing the topics and speakers for the 26 breakout sessions at DBW 2015. It serves as a checklist of “things to think about right now” for book publishers living through the experience of digital change. The entire program is here. We decided not to link to each and every […]
Peter McCarthy and I have a new business and publishing has a new digital marketing service
Today Peter McCarthy and I are formally announcing a new business which is a partnership between us: The Logical Marketing Agency. What we’re doing is applying the most modern and sophisticated digital marketing techniques and capabilities to the challenges faced by book publishers and authors — and therefore agents — and, because the same techniques […]
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 […]
Introducing E2BU, indispensible for anybody investing in ebook enhancement
Last winter, before the announcement of the Agency model as the path to ebook price maintenance, some major publishers had acknowledged out loud that enhancing ebooks in various ways would be the way to keep the public paying print book prices for content. That got me thinking. First I thought about the CD-Rom debacle of […]