The Wall Street Journal wrote last week about what we have been concerned about for some time: how hard it will be for publishers to sustain book prices as supply (of books) rises faster than demand because of all the self-publishing being done. WSJ built their story around John Locke, whose thrillers are 99 cents […]
Lots going on; no single topic today
I find myself with a lot of pages open on my web browser. Even before Amazon’s announcement yesterday about ebooks passing hardcovers in sales this past quarter, there has been a lot going on. There had been some suggestions, which I never bought into, that ebook sales were slowing in 2009. (Is this a meme […]
Agency seems (to me) to be working; I hope it’s legal
A year ago, before Agency was ever publicly discussed, I was grasping for what publishers could do to get control of ebook pricing and curtail, or at least manage, the degree to which ebooks undercut paper and, in turn, brick-and-mortar. At the time, people told me that it was possible for a manufacturer to control the pricing […]
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 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 […]