In some ways, I think this year’s Publishers Launch Frankfurt show kicks off the next era of digital change in global publishing. The US and other English-speaking markets have established clearly that immersive reading — fiction and narrative non-fiction — is easily ported to screens for most people. In the past 18 months, changes in […]
Things to think about as the digital book revolution gains global steam
The switchover from reading print to reading on screens, with the companion effect that increasingly the purchase of books is done online rather than in stores, is far advanced in the English-speaking world and especially so in the United States. In the past 12 months, the UK has begun to resemble the US market in […]
Auletta’s New Yorker piece is good orientation for thinking about the DoJ case
Writing about the lawsuit the DoJ has instituted against Apple and five leading publishers is very hard. It’s a big issue and doing it justice requires navigating two very large and complex bodies of knowledge: anti-trust law and the trade book publishing business. Whenever I write about it, I feel handicapped because I don’t know […]
The ebook marketplace is a long way from settled
When we put on conferences, we sometimes book speakers because of who they are, or who their company is, but we also do our best to make sure the content of their presentation will be useful to our audience. So I had booked Matteo Berlucchi, the CEO of the British ebook startup Anobii, to speak […]
Things learned and thoughts provoked by London Book Fair 2012
This post contains a batch of observations from this year’s London Book Fair. Some of it recalled an experience from about 20 years ago. We’ll begin there. In the early 1990s, Microsoft was on a mission to get computer hardware manufacturers to install CD-Rom drives in new machines. Microsoft had a very simple motivation. Software […]