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) […]
Three points worth adding to the excellent account of the Amazon story in The Everything Store
The publication of Brad Stone’s book about Amazon, “The Everything Store”, is the catalyst for a lot of new discussion about the topic most difficult for the book business to discuss. It is pretty much impossible to be in the book business without benefiting from Amazon’s market reach. But it is also pretty standard fare […]
Now HERE is an experiment that looks like it worked and is worthy of replication
The new opportunity to publish a book without printed inventory has been popularized primarily by self-publishing authors and by new fledgling publishing enterprises like Entangled and Byliner following in the footsteps of earlier pioneers like eReads and Ellora’s Cave and, more recently, Open Road. This changes the economics of publishing substantially, taking a very large […]
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 […]
Marketing will replace editorial as the driving force behind publishing houses
One of the things my father, Leonard Shatzkin, taught me when I was first learning about book publishing a half-century ago was that “all publishing houses are started with an editorial inspiration”. What he meant by that is that what motivated somebody to start a book publisher was an idea about what to publish. That […]
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