Amazon dropped a shoe last week when they announced their new mystery imprint, Thomas & Mercer Books, and started signing authors, including self-publishing evangelist, Joe Konrath. Last night they dropped the other shoe, which turned out to be a very heavy boot. They signed former Time Warner Publishing (the company that is now Hachette Book […]
The old publishing value chain got twisted a bit last week
Although the value chain in trade publishing for the last century has, for the most part, kept retailers between publishers and consumers and kept publishers between retailers and authors, that has never been 100% true. Doubleday covered the whole value chain in the 1950s, when it not only owned the Doubleday Book Shops and the […]
Ebooks are making me recall the history of mass-market publishing
The ebook revolution is really beginning to remind me of the mass-market papeback revolution. The mass paperback was really “invented” by Sir Allan Lane when he created Penguin in Britain before World War II. (Wikipedia credits a German publisher with the first cheap paperbacks a few years earlier, but Lane was certainly the first in […]
Publishers better start using their scale to price better, and soon!
It was just about two years ago that I appeared on a panel at a meeting of agents with, among others, Macmillan CEO John Sargent and Sargent made the point that maintaining ebook pricing and margins was one of the critical challenges facing publishers. Ebook sales were still hovering around one percent of the business. […]
Random House joining the (formerly) Agency 5, and what it might mean
Now the Big Six are all selling ebooks on the agency model. Random House has joined their five competitors. It is almost a year since Apple launched the iPad, opened the iBookstore, and delivered big publishers an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the ebook marketplace, at least for their books and at least for […]
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