This is an unusually brief post today, but some worthy observations don’t require long explanations. I wrote nearly 18 months ago about my concern that publishers’ interest in enhanced ebooks would bring on a repeat of the commercially disastrous CD-Rom era of the mid-1990s. Of course, since the CD-Rom era, a lot has changed. * […]
All publishers and book retailers are global now
One of the key building blocks of my career was the six years I spent working on a program called “Publishing in the 21st Century” with Mark Bide and a team at Vista Computer Services (now Publishing Technologies) led by then-Chairman Denis Bennett, John Wicker (now at Tata Consulting Services), and Martyn Daniels (now at Value-Chain […]
Building a new-fangled conference program the old-fashioned way
There is certainly more than one way to build a conference program. I have been putting them together since long before I learned about the concept of “crowd-sourcing”. I’m a bit of a plowhorse about some things so the Digital Book World conference program comes together pretty much the same way as the first digital […]
Where do we lose the shelf space and how much do we lose?
There are two questions about the impact of digital change on publishing that are just about impossible to answer. One is: how much of the sale of ebooks is incremental business and how much of it is cannibalization of prior print sales? The other is: what will be the fate of independent bookstores? The two […]
A brilliant Conference Council helps make a great Digital Book World
We had a very successful debut annual conference for Digital Book World last January, even though we didn’t conceive the idea until June, put together a group of helpers (which we now call our Conference Council) until July, or draft the initial program until August. This year we’re way ahead of that schedule. We’ve put […]