There’s quite a bit of publishing about publishing going on in the next few weeks. British academic John B. Thompson has written a solid scholarly history of book publishing in the past quarter century or so called “Book Wars” that will publish next month, focused on the arrival of ebooks and how publishers and the […]
Four years into the ebook revolution: things we know and things we don’t know
One could say (and I would) that the ereading revolution is coming up to its 4th anniversary since it was late November 2007 when Amazon first released the Kindle. There had been dedicated ereading devices before then, including the Sony Reader — in the market when Kindle arrived and still here, if not wildly successful […]
Guessing wrong about the future happens to all of us; here are 2 times it happened to me
One very lucky thing for those of us who are in the habit of predicting the future is that very few people keep score on us. We mostly keep score on ourselves. When I want to remind readers of something I said previously, I link back to it and call it forward it again. But […]
New ways to sell ebooks aren’t easy to implement
A simple and perfectly sensible suggestion emerged on the Brantley email list yesterday but the conversation around it showed that some stark realities about the book world have not yet been taken on board, even in very sophisticated circles (which this list is.) The list discussed a suggestion from librarian Josh Greenberg that publishers take note of […]
The Sourcebooks experiment with Bran Hambric: publishers in the early “establishment” stage of ebook adoption
In a post last week we reviewed what Sourcebook CEO Dominque Raccah did — announcing she was holding back the ebook publication of a new hardcover YA novel coming this September — and why she said she did it. Over the weekend, we posted about what we see as the four stages of ebook adoption. […]