On May 28, I gave a speech called “Stay Ahead of the Shift: How Content-Centric Publishers Can Flourish in a Community-Centric Web World” at BookExpo America. From today (June 12) through Monday morning (June 15), we are able to show you the video of the speech (below). We have also put the slides and full […]
A technology that could unlock a door to the future
Michael Cairns blogged yesterday about a deal SharedBook has just made with ourenergypolicy.org to use an annotation technology SharedBook has. SharedBook is a client and I spent some time this morning getting updated by CEO Caroline Vanderlip about this new technology. This is wikipedia-type capability with a spin that publishers and authors will really like. […]
The Digital State of Play in the US
…in the 21st century, the net is flipping this on us. The net tends to self-organize us by subject niche, so the eyeballs and human bandwidth are linked to the niches, which are vertical, not horizontal. And because web interaction is about file exchanges, format specificity is meaningless. The file can hold text, art or photographs or other graphics, animation, moving images, sound, games, or code that helps us combine, sort, or tag things
End of General Trade Publishing Houses (Completely Retold)
I am not predicting that everybody will read on screens. You probably know that I’m a fan of the Kindle and perhaps you know that I’ve been an avid ebook reader on a Palm for almost 10 years. But I’ve learned that other people’s attachment to paper is greater than mine. And anyway, it would be a good thing for general trade publishers if there were more screen takeup; it would mean keeping the readers for their content and not necessarily any loss in margin
15 Trends To Watch In 2008
Industry guru Mike Shatzkin foresees big gains in e-book sales, consolidation among literary agencies, a jump in customized book sales and much more…. You won’t catch me climbing out onto any billion-dollar limbs as I offer my forecast for book publishing in 2008, but some of the changes I envision do call for fundamental changes in how the business operates. There is an overarching theme to the changes already taking place. Consumer media in the 20th century tended to be horizontal and format-specific. The New York Times and Random House define “horizontal”: they publish across all interests and markets. The Internet will drive 21st-century publishing enterprises to be more like what professional publishing has always been: highly vertical and format-agnostic.