With the news this morning that Scribd has thrown in the towel on unlimited ebook subscriptions, Amazon is the last player standing with an “all-you-can-eat” ebook subscription offer for a general audience. The juxtaposition of the publishers’ insistence on being paid full price for ebooks being lent once and the late Oyster’s and the now thrice-hobbled […]
Agents who come to Digital Book World will learn a lot they can immediately apply
The mission of the Digital Book World conference is industry education around digital change. There is a plethora of programming for this year’s event that will serve that purpose particularly well for literary agents. Of all the people in the industry, it would seem to me that agents would get the fastest and surest “return […]
Book publishing lives in an environment shaped by larger forces and always has
(Note to my readers. This longer-than-usual post is really two. The first half is a recital of what I believe is very relevant history. The second half is about how things are now. Although I am personally fascinated by the historical context, if you get bored with the history, the bolded text below marks the […]
Big focus at DBW 2016 on the tech companies that are shaping the world the book business has to live in
Realities change. Ever since Amazon arrived in the “book business” 20 years ago, each year the “book business” has become less and less of a stand-alone industry. Of course, the only part that ever really was a stand-alone was the trade business, where the entire ecosystem: authors and their agents, publishers, booksellers, and even — […]