It is safe to assume that everybody in this room read Ken Auletta's piece in The New Yorker a month ago which described in somewhat frightening terms the current state of consumer publishing in the US. It was a piece that didn't make any publishing … [Continue reading]
Taming the Inventory Tiger
The part of the value chain we will focus on in this discussion is the money end for consumer publishers, where the cash register rings: the final steps in the supply chain that run from the publisher, sometimes through a wholesaler, to a store shelf … [Continue reading]
Staying Competitive in a Wired World
One of the trickier aspects of thinking about the Internet is that it can be so many different things. In one exercise our company is involved in at the moment, we are recommending to a large publisher that every editor have a Web site to facilitate … [Continue reading]
Books as Bytes: Death of the Paper Book?
The general topic that I want to talk about today is how the technology, which we will define broadly as the delivery of computer bytes where once we would have delivered print, is affecting book publishing businesses. We will see that perhaps the … [Continue reading]
Selling Books on the Internet
This conference is billed as a repeat of the June conference, when I delivered a speech called "What If?: Surprises Your Competitors Could Deliver Tomorrow Morning". Perhaps the surprise this morning is that I've changed the speech to a new subject, … [Continue reading]