At the conclusion of another Frankfurt Book Fair — my thirty-somethingth — here is something I actually knew before but have taken on board in a whole new way: there is an enormous gap between the US and everyplace else in the Western world (at least) in consumer ebook takeup and acceptance. Here is what […]
Three new ebook platforms nearing their debut
A year ago — even six months ago — it seemed like Amazon and its Kindle device had an insurmountable advantage in the ebook device and platform competition. Despite our admonition that Amazon’s dominance of ebooks was much more fragile than their dominance in online print bookselling, even we were impressed and sometimes daunted by […]
It isn’t wise to draw lines in the sand that ultimately can’t be defended
Apologies in advance for a much-longer-than-usual post. It is not like the publishers haven’t seen the ebook royalty fight coming. On a panel he and I were on together in March of 2009, John Sargent, the Chairman and CEO of Macmillan, identified ebook margins as the critical issue for publishers going forward. Even though ebook […]
Where will bookstores be five years from now?
Upton Sinclair famously said that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” I keep putting facts about publishing’s commercial realities that I think most of the smart people running things accept together with forecasts for the future that I think most of the […]
Big publishers have reason to be happy about how the book market is evolving
Big publishers have to be very happy about how things have been developing in the ebook world over the last six months or so. In that time, we have gone from a situation in which Kindle appeared to so totally dominate digital reading that Kindle-only publishing seemed an imminent threat to disintermediate publishers to one […]