A dispute broke out on Brantley’s list this morning and I’m in a distinct minority. Maybe a minority of only a bit more than one. The brouhaha started with observations about ebook pricing, with some very disdainful remarks about Agency pricing in principle and the big publishers’ execution of it in particular. The complaint was […]
Introducing E2BU, indispensible for anybody investing in ebook enhancement
Last winter, before the announcement of the Agency model as the path to ebook price maintenance, some major publishers had acknowledged out loud that enhancing ebooks in various ways would be the way to keep the public paying print book prices for content. That got me thinking. First I thought about the CD-Rom debacle of […]
With new opportunities come new challenges
This blog and my speeches contain frequent references to what we see as the big shifts the book publishing industry, and some publishers more than others, are feeling. The horizontal and format-specific product-centric media of the 20th century are inexorably yielding to the vertical and format-agnostic community-centric delivery environment for content that will soon predominate. In […]
O’Reilly’s Offer of Distribution Points to a Larger Change
One of the most significant pieces of news to come out of Tools of Change is that O’Reilly is going into the distribution business for ebooks. This is indeed, a “tool” of change. It is also a harbinger of times to come that threaten a lot of big companies: major publishers; the big distributors like Perseus, […]
Some thoughts about piracy
As part of the program-creation process for Digital Book World, I had a round of conversations with the top executives of the Big Six companies to discuss the agenda, mostly with the CEOs. The purpose of the check-ins was to find out what topics the CEOs wanted their companies to speak about and, of course, […]