(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 […]
Export sales is one of the few areas of predictable growth for book publishers
For a client meeting last week, I was shown a chart that came from Bookstats of channel revenue for publishers. Bookstats is the recent (and now no longer) partnership between the AAP and BISG collecting book publisher shipment information. It has four years of data, which were arrayed in a neat bar chart. Since the chart […]
Digital change: what’s an independent bookseller to do?
The question of how to plug the independent bookseller into the digital revolution is a knotty one. Nobody has really “solved” it. Two of the smartest guys in the UK, Francis Bennett and Michael Holdsworth, tried to tackle this question in a report for the Booksellers Association in a report published in 2007. While they […]
The Book Business Ain’t The Music Business
Len Vlahos of the ABA is the latest to take on the noble but very difficult task of encouraging independent booksellers in the digital age. Independent booksellers face a challenge similar to that of publishers adjusting to the change we’re facing: the skill sets and predelictions that are useful for what they’ve been doing don’t […]