(This is a longer-than-usual Shatzkin Files post reviewing the topics and speakers for the 26 breakout sessions at DBW 2015. It serves as a checklist of “things to think about right now” for book publishers living through the experience of digital change. The entire program is here. We decided not to link to each and every […]
The support infrastructure for entities to publish is growing but the most important piece may not yet be provided
I remember a song lyric from the early 70s for which the opening line was: “we don’t need more sailors, we need a captain”. (I can’t find the reference in LyricFind and I don’t remember the name of the band.) That song could be about the new publishing that is arising from the phenomenon of […]
Export sales is one of the few areas of predictable growth for book publishers
For a client meeting last week, I was shown a chart that came from Bookstats of channel revenue for publishers. Bookstats is the recent (and now no longer) partnership between the AAP and BISG collecting book publisher shipment information. It has four years of data, which were arrayed in a neat bar chart. Since the chart […]
Much-trumpeted survey proves the opposite of what the surveyors seem to think it does
Do library eborrowers also buy ebooks? Well, stop the presses. OverDrive, the leading aggregator providing libaries with ebooks, and Library Journal* have done research that proves that they do. (*My error hereby corrected: American Library Association, not Library Journal.) The survey results are interpreted as evidence that the big publishers are making a terrible mistake being […]
More thoughts on libraries and ebook lending
On Thursday of this week, I’ll be at the Charleston Conference appearing in a conversation organized by Anthony Watkinson that includes me and Peter Brantley. Brantley and Watkinson both have extensive backgrounds in the library and academic worlds, which are the milieux of most attendees at this conference. I don’t. I am being brought in […]