The estimable Clay Shirky has written a lengthy piece called “Amazon, Publishers, and Readers” on medium.com saying, essentially, that an Amazon-dominated world would be an improvement over the Big Five “cartel”-dominated world of publishing we have today. This is an apples to oranges comparison. The Big Five are not nearly as broad a cartel as […]
Finding your next book, or, the discovery problem
A big flap has arisen this week — which I believe I would have been equally aware of had I been home in New York rather than in London — because the giant UK books-and-stationery retailer WH Smith has apparently found inappropriate ebooks being recommended through the kids books portions of the Kobo-managed ebook offering […]
We got lucky with the speakers we booked for Publishers Launch Frankfurt
Branch Rickey, the fabled baseball executive who gave us racial integration, farm systems, and a host of great teams over fifty years, used to say “luck is the residue of design”. I’d like to think he was right, because we have really been lucky with our Frankfurt show for Publishers Launch, which we present in […]