…the study makes clear what we all know: that the dynamic growth is online and in the trade book area. The used book market for college textbooks has been organizing and developing for many decades and it benefits from a geographical concentration of used book buyers and sellers that does not exist for trade books. And the online market is where the used book action is growing by leaps and bounds, not in shops of any kind. Focusing on the action for used trade books online will produce a much more useful study and probably would reduce the cost
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Publishing and Digital Change: What’s Next?
In the late 1990s, ending sometime in the year 2000, the apparent pace of change in publishing was breathtaking. Many propositions we can barely remember: Ebrary, Questia, eRights, eContent, Hungry Minds, Softbook, Rocket Book, and so many others, competed for publishers’ attention, for publishers’ content, and, a bit painfully, for publishers’ staffs. We had barely heard of Google then, Microsoft seemed like a force that would dominate the rest of our lives, and Apple was barely breathing. The idea that Publishers Lunch might become more important than Publishers Weekly would have seemed laughable to almost anybody except Michael Cader. A whole host of things that really matter today – iPods, blogs, and podcasts among them – had not yet arrived on the scene
Keynote Address – “The New Face of Publishing” Conference
One of the first times I talked to a book publishing audience trying to visualize the future that digital change would bring was about ten years ago at Book Expo America. It was already apparent at that time that the music business might have a major problem and there seemed to be ways that publishing might follow
Facing up to the Big Questions
For the most part, book publishing is a business that requires looking well into the future. Once books are commissioned, they take months, if not years, to be completed editorially before they can even be introduced into a lengthy production and marketing process, and then be launched into what a publisher usually hopes will be a lengthy period of sales. Up until very recently, readers’ interest in the subject matter of a book was a moving target for publishers: would it survive, or grow, between the time of commitment and the time of publication?
Toward a More Fragmented Future – Publishing’s Era of Consolidation Nears an End
…if you ask the big bookstore chains what is their biggest concern about the marketplace, they say ‘consolidation among the big publishers.’ This little informal survey accurately depicted the dominant trend across publishing of the last quarter of the 20th century