I am getting ready to attend my first Digital Book World as a “civilian” (having programmed and moderated the first seven), Thinking about DBW entails recognizing how different the book publishing world today is from what I expected three or six years ago. Be that as it may, the big challenges for the industry — […]
The big global publishers are integrating across both territories and languages
Since I posted this two days ago, one of the Big Five CEOs pointed out some things I missed that are important. These are addressed in a post-script at the bottom. Subscribers to the blog would have received the original post without the “correction”. My apologies. The announcement this week that John Sargent has apparently […]
It is hard for publishers to apply even Harvard B School advice in their struggle with Amazon
Harvard Business Review published an article recently by Benjamin Edelman called “Mastering the Intermediaries” which gives advice to businesses trying to avoid some of the consequences of audience aggregation and control by an intermediary. The article was aimed at restaurants who don’t want their fate controlled by Open Table or travel companies who don’t want […]
What to watch for in 2013
Although “digital change in publishing” has a year that lags the calendar year and this year won’t “end” until we have a read on how post-Christmas ebook sales were affected by the new devices consumers got for Christmas, the dropping of the ball in Times Square is the signal most of us respond to when […]
The ebook marketplace is a long way from settled
When we put on conferences, we sometimes book speakers because of who they are, or who their company is, but we also do our best to make sure the content of their presentation will be useful to our audience. So I had booked Matteo Berlucchi, the CEO of the British ebook startup Anobii, to speak […]