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What Oyster going down demonstrates is not mostly about the viability of ebook subscriptions

September 23, 2015 by Mike Shatzkin 28 Comments

The news that the general ebook subscription offering Oyster is throwing in the towel was not really a surprise. The business model they were forced to adopt for the biggest publishers — paying full price for each use of a book with a threshold trigger at considerably less than a complete read while, at the […]

Filed Under: Atomization, eBooks, General Trade Publishing, Global, Licensing and Rights, Marketing, New Models, rights, Scale, Self-Publishing, Subscriptions, Supply-Chain, Vertical Tagged With: 24Symbols, Amazon, Android, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Big Five, Borders, Carolyn Reidy, Entitle, Google, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Ingram, Ingram Internet Support Services, iOS, Kindle Unlimited, Kobo, KU, Macmillan, New York Times, Oyster, Penguin Random House, Rakuten, Russell Grandinetti, Safari, Scribd, Simon & Schuster

Not all books and not all subscription services are created equal

June 11, 2014 by Mike Shatzkin 3 Comments

Digital change has forced many book publishers to rethink the mix of their lists. The most obvious aspect of that is the need for increased vertical-, topic- or audience-consciousness. In the days when bookstores did most of the selling, all publishers could reach audiences in stores by being displayed in the right section (or sections). […]

Filed Under: General Trade Publishing, Licensing and Rights, Marketing, New Models, Supply-Chain, Vertical Tagged With: Andrew Savikas, Bank of America, Boeing, Logical Marketing, Oracle, Oyster, Peter McCarthy, Safari, Scribd

Subscription services for ebooks progress to becoming a real experiment

May 27, 2014 by Mike Shatzkin 16 Comments

My long-held conviction that broad-based subscriptions for ebooks were not likely to work is partly based on facts that are now changing. It is still by no means a slam dunk that ebooks must go where Spotify has taken digital music and Netflix has taken the digital distribution of TV and movies, but it looks […]

Filed Under: Authors, eBooks, General Trade Publishing, Licensing and Rights, New Models, Scale, Supply-Chain Tagged With: 24Symbols, Amazon, Amazon Prime, Big Five, Book-of-the-Month Club, Carolyn Reidy, Evan Schnittman, Hachette, HarperCollins, Kindle Owners Lending Library, Macmillan, Netflix, Oyster, Penguin Random House, PRH, S&S, Safari, Scribd, Simon & Schuster, Spotify

Nine places to look in 2014 to predict the future of publishing

January 1, 2014 by Mike Shatzkin 59 Comments

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 […]

Filed Under: Authors, eBooks, General Trade Publishing, Marketing, New Models, rights, Scale, Self-Publishing, Supply-Chain Tagged With: 24Symbols, Amazon, Amazon Prime, Apple, Big One, Big Six, Curtis Brown, Derek Jeter, Diversion, E-Reads, Entitle, eReatah, Following Four, Hugh Howey, iPad, John Locke, Kindle, Kindle Fire, Kindle Owners Lending Library, Matchbook, O'Reilly, Oyster, Pearson, Penguin Random House, PRH, Rosetta, Safari, Scribd, Simon & Schuster, Writer's House

The truth is we do not yet know whether ebooks will work for anything except readerly books

December 4, 2013 by Mike Shatzkin 36 Comments

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) […]

Filed Under: eBooks, General Trade Publishing, New Models, Vertical Tagged With: "What Technology Wants", Aerbook, Aptara, Books in Browsers, Citia, Dr. David Hessayon, Experts guides, Inkling, Kevin Kelly, Mark Bide, Nate Hoffelder, New York Times, O'Reilly, Pearson, Peter Brantley, Peter Meyers, Publishing in the 21st Century, Random House, Random House UK, Safari

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Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin is the Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and a widely-acknowledged thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry. Read more.

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Recent Posts

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  • When a publisher might not do as good a job as a self-publishing author
  • What the ruling against the PRH-S&S merger means for the publishing business
  • “Automated ebook marketing by Open Road; can anybody else do it?”
  • How book publishing has changed in recent decades and the puzzling question of what comes next

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