(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 […]
It is hard for publishers to apply even Harvard B School advice in their struggle with Amazon
Harvard Business Review published an article recently by Benjamin Edelman called “Mastering the Intermediaries” which gives advice to businesses trying to avoid some of the consequences of audience aggregation and control by an intermediary. The article was aimed at restaurants who don’t want their fate controlled by Open Table or travel companies who don’t want […]
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) […]
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 […]
What does a consultant do at the London Book Fair?
I spent a chunk of yesterday working on this post while, with one eye, I was watching the news about the volcanic eruption in Iceland that shut UK air traffic. As I post this on Friday morning with a flight scheduled to leave tomorrow night near midnight, I’d guess the chances of actually getting there […]