(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 […]
Enter Curriculet, one of the new ventures signaling the opportunities for publishers in the Common Core
The new Common Core standards, which are essentially descriptions of things kids should have learned and know by various ages and grades, are now being adopted and adjusted to by elementary and secondary schools across the country. Common Core, besides providing the standards, encourages the practice of educating kids using content not created expressly for […]
Nine places to look in 2014 to predict the future of publishing
The digital transition of the trade book publishing business, which I would date from the opening of Amazon.com in 1995, enters its 20th year in 2014. Here are some of the ponderables as we close out the first two decades of a process of very rapid change that is far from over. 1. What’s going […]
The truth is we do not yet know whether ebooks will work for anything except readerly books
In the 1990s, Mark Bide would always begin the “Publishing in the 21st Century” conferences we ran by reviewing the research we had done around some aspect of digital change in publishing with the admonition that book publishing was “many very different businesses.” By that, Mark meant that trade publishers (who sold primarily through bookstores) […]
How much time and effort should established publishers be spending on startups?
We are now in a period replete with startups that want to be the disruption in publishing. We see a lot of them in our office. Part of our business involves helping startups find relevance and contacts within the established publishing community. There are three areas in particular which the startups seem to think the […]