Michael Cader did a brilliant analysis of Thursday’s New York Times piece on ebook pricing, published exclusively for paid subscribers to Publishers Lunch. The Times piece’s shortcoming was that it tended to sensationalize the news that the prices the public will pay for current brand-name ebooks will be going up. If you observe the book […]
Are “enhanced ebooks” the CD-Rom era all over again?
Is this where I came in? In the early 1990s, the computer manufacturers and Microsoft were doing everything they could to persuade businesses and consumers that they really, really, really needed CD-Rom drives. That Microsoft would benefit from them was very clear; the software they were selling was taking more and more diskettes to deliver […]
The tipping has really already started
The idea of an “Ebook Tipping Point” panel for Digital Book World arose when I wrote a blogpost last August https://idealog.com/blog/ebook-growth-explosive-serious-disruptions-around-the-corner on the occasion of the regular monthly release of the IDPF’s ebook sales figures. It was clear then that very substantial percentages of the sale of new narrative fiction and non-fiction were going to […]
VIDEO: Planning for a Long Career in an Industry That’s Changing
Mike’s speech to a packed house at Hachette, as part of a lunchtime lecture series known as The Publishing Point. Delivering what proved to be a thought-provoking and farsighted view of the future of the book industry, Mike had some clear advice for those planning a long career in publishing: the companies that will succeed will be those that focus on building compelling content for well-defined “vertical communities.”
The ebook windowing controversy has subtext
It took me a couple of days of pondering this to come to my current understanding of it, but I now think that Carolyn Reidy of Simon & Schuster and David Young of Hachette Book Group, since joined by Brian Murray of HarperCollins, are not really fighting a battle to rescue hardcover books from price […]