A recent post here that incited a long comment string and another on FutureBook that was quite unrelated from the estimable Brian O’Leary have helped me formulate some thinking which I hope can be helpful in evaluating any “Great Change” post that arises about publishing. And they do, indeed, arise often. O’Leary’s post builds on […]
The truth is we do not yet know whether ebooks will work for anything except readerly books
In the 1990s, Mark Bide would always begin the “Publishing in the 21st Century” conferences we ran by reviewing the research we had done around some aspect of digital change in publishing with the admonition that book publishing was “many very different businesses.” By that, Mark meant that trade publishers (who sold primarily through bookstores) […]
What I was thinking when I said that wild stuff
At our Publishers Launch Conference on the Wednesday of BEA, Michael Cader and I introduced a new feature we think will become regular at our events: a candid 1-on-1 conversation between us. It went well. In fact, it went so well that what reads like a pretty damn accurate verbatim account of much of it […]
Paying authors more might be the best economics for publishers in the long run
If you imagine the publisher’s business as one that divides most of the consumer’s dollar between two core stakeholders in the supply chain — the retailer and the author — you’d have a pretty accurate picture. The publishers, at least theoretically, decide what the retailer’s “working margin” will be with their discounts and agency agreements. […]
Which flies the coop first? the chicken or the egg?
There are lessons that can be taught or learned in one segment of publishing that can then apply to another. Well over a decade ago, Mark Bide and I were discussing the business model for journals. The way it works is that the university pays the professors a salary and rewards them with promotions and […]