Michael Cairns has a really good post today that distills a lot of thoughts I have had over the last several years into a clear formulation: that the publisher needs to serve as a “digital concierge” for its author. Three years ago, Brian O’Leary, Ted Hill, and I did a study of marketing spend for […]
Ideas triggered by Amazon buying Lexcycle
The acquisition of Lexcycle by Amazon sure got all the digerati’s creative juices flowing. What is becoming increasingly clear is that general trade publishers have a card to play here that the niche publishers can only join in on: creating a collectively-owned ebook “store” that can provide an economic baseline for the emerging ebook marketplace. […]
The Google settlement, answering some of the questions about the windfall
The post from Thursday about the Google “windfall” provoked a lot of information sources to help me understand the settlement, large parts of which I clearly did not. We’ll go over the answers I got (as I understand them; my understanding seems to be a moving target…) to the questions Michael Cairns and I posed […]
The Google settlement and unanswered questions, particularly about the windfall
Michael Cairns and I have both been frustrated with most of the conversation surrounding the Google Book Search settlement. The principal concerns of most of the participants in the dialogue seem to be: 1. Has Google unfairly captured a monopoly on some content? 2. Has the “class” of “orphan authors” been dealt with fairly, since […]
A technology that could unlock a door to the future
Michael Cairns blogged yesterday about a deal SharedBook has just made with ourenergypolicy.org to use an annotation technology SharedBook has. SharedBook is a client and I spent some time this morning getting updated by CEO Caroline Vanderlip about this new technology. This is wikipedia-type capability with a spin that publishers and authors will really like. […]