One of the subjects we have been probing for a long time is the inevitable impact that increased purchasing of books online would have on the shelf space at retail and what that would mean to trade publishers. (You’ll see that this speech that is well more than a decade old also says publishers are […]
No, Mike Shatzkin did NOT say that publishing is spiraling down the drain
As part of the promotion of the Digital Book World conference, I do some interviewing with the very capable Jeremy Greenfield, the editor of their blog. And Jeremy takes our conversations and chops them up into short pieces around the themes of our show. Since the focus of Digital Book World is “how digital is […]
Losing bookstores is a much bigger problem for publishers than it is for readers
Start with this. You’re kidding yourself if you’re a book publisher who believes the digital revolution has slowed down, that independent bookstores will thrive in the new environment, that ebooks — if not a fad — have reached their growth limits, and that something resembling the book business we’ve known for the past 100 years […]
How many Christmases until we see a whole new industry?
John Makinson, the global CEO of Penguin, was quoted in a Reuters article saying that the post-Christmas period in publishing coming up is “tougher to predict” than “any time that I can remember”. Asked what he sees in the immediate future, Makinson replied “dark clouds”. Makinson’s concerns reflect one we have written about many times […]
I thought I was writing a blog, but it turns out I wrote a book!
An ebook of the first two years of The Shatzkin Files is now available and will be linked for the forseeable future from our left nav bar. This post is the introduction to the ebook, which explains how it came about. My friend, Joe Esposito, first told me about blogs in the early part of […]