There’s a new Big Six in town. Or maybe not “in town.” But “on the planet.” The Big Six is a term commonly used to collectively designate the behemoths of US trade publishing: Random House, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. Although there are other large players, some of whom occasionally […]
A brilliant Conference Council helps make a great Digital Book World
We had a very successful debut annual conference for Digital Book World last January, even though we didn’t conceive the idea until June, put together a group of helpers (which we now call our Conference Council) until July, or draft the initial program until August. This year we’re way ahead of that schedule. We’ve put […]
Are free ebooks a good idea or not?
Kindle is certainly engendering a lot of confusion by billboarding the downloads of free ebooks as “sales.” That paradoxical scorekeeping was the lead for an article by Motoko Rich in The New York Times on Saturday that quoted a lot of people, some apparently disagreeing with each other, but none of them necessarily wrong. There […]
Two anomalies on my desk this morning
While the AAP reports that US book sales are definitely down and my friends in major houses report a decline of 10% or more across the board, that’s not what we’re hearing from Canada and it’s not what we hard from small and midsize publishers responding to our BISG “Shifting Sales Channels” survey. BookNet Canada […]
Riffing on Tamblyn’s “6 Things”, Part 1
Michael Tamblyn, the smart and dynamic leader of Booknet Canada who has performed minor miracles with the Canadian supply chain, gave a talk at his company’s tech forum a fortnight ago that has gotten a lot of deserved attention. It’s 30 minutes long, but it flies by and the presentation is great fun: very much […]