Since the merger that has created Penguin Random House, there has been precious little speculation (except by me, as far as I can tell) about what this new behemoth in trade book publishing could do to exploit their scale in new and innovative ways. Their scale advantage is huge. PRH has something in the neighborhood […]
Publishers do need to sell direct, but here are five things they should at least be started on first
The “Code Meet Print” blog by Glenn Nano recently reprised a subject I wrote about 18 months ago: the benefits that flow to publishers that sell direct. In that piece, I highlighted the disagreement that seemed to exist at that time between my advocacy of direct selling of ebooks particularly and Random House’s lack of […]
No-inventory publishing changes everything for everybody and nobody will escape making adjustments
A somewhat overwrought article in Wired calling ebooks an “abomination” because they “price people out of reading” provokes thinking about how much the business models for the trade book business are changing. The article’s weakness stems from its focus on the pricing decisions publishers are making in selling print and ebooks to libraries when those […]
We got lucky with the speakers we booked for Publishers Launch Frankfurt
Branch Rickey, the fabled baseball executive who gave us racial integration, farm systems, and a host of great teams over fifty years, used to say “luck is the residue of design”. I’d like to think he was right, because we have really been lucky with our Frankfurt show for Publishers Launch, which we present in […]
What to watch for in 2013
Although “digital change in publishing” has a year that lags the calendar year and this year won’t “end” until we have a read on how post-Christmas ebook sales were affected by the new devices consumers got for Christmas, the dropping of the ball in Times Square is the signal most of us respond to when […]