Stats are often hard to interpret in our business. The reported data comes, of course, after the fact (you can’t report things before they happen) and is often aggregated in ways that don’t tell us what we really need to know. So I tried an exercise last week of asking a few agents for their […]
No predictions this year; just questions
This is the time of year for predictions. I’ve done mine in the spirit of the holiday season in years past, going back to the late 1980s when I did a “My Say” for Publishers Weekly. (I wasn’t able to find it — some sharp reader will — but I recall that one of my […]
Lots going on; no single topic today
I find myself with a lot of pages open on my web browser. Even before Amazon’s announcement yesterday about ebooks passing hardcovers in sales this past quarter, there has been a lot going on. There had been some suggestions, which I never bought into, that ebook sales were slowing in 2009. (Is this a meme […]
Digital change: what’s an independent bookseller to do?
The question of how to plug the independent bookseller into the digital revolution is a knotty one. Nobody has really “solved” it. Two of the smartest guys in the UK, Francis Bennett and Michael Holdsworth, tried to tackle this question in a report for the Booksellers Association in a report published in 2007. While they […]
Publishers need to be clearer about their rights
Some of the recent conversation about ebook fair use sparked by the Kindle-and-audio incident made me recall that Joe Esposito and I had written about this problem in Publishers Weekly more than two years ago. We had a different catalyst for our thinking; at the time, we were wondering what the rules should be for […]