The acquisition of Lexcycle by Amazon sure got all the digerati’s creative juices flowing. What is becoming increasingly clear is that general trade publishers have a card to play here that the niche publishers can only join in on: creating a collectively-owned ebook “store” that can provide an economic baseline for the emerging ebook marketplace. […]
Search Results for: metadata
This ebook thing is just going to get more complicated
Adam Hodgkin at the Exact Editions blog posted a piece that explains the ebook strategies of Apple, Amazon, and Google in simple terms. Hodgkin’s piece really helps think things through, but I think his analysis is a bit oversimplified (which is part of why it helps think things through.) Hodgkin sees brilliance in Apple’s move not to […]
The Future of Books for Publishers and Booksellers
There is a big picture and a long arc within which our day-to-day activities are taking place. The 20th century consumer media were horizontal in their subject matter — that is, very broad — and format-specific. In the States, that means entities like CBS or NBC in television, The New York Times, or Random House. All of these companies provide content across the full range of human subject interests, but they pretty much stick to their formats: broadcast, newspapers, and books, respectively
Success in a Parallel Universe: Perhaps with Some Help from Your DAD
We’re going to discuss a subject this morning that was on hardly any radar screens a year ago; it would not have been a compelling subject for presentation at last year’s Making Information Pay. But today, Digital Asset Distribution is on a lot of minds. What happened?
After all, book content has been going out on the web for quite a while. My company did a digital marketing program for a book called “Longitude” in late 1995 which centered around offering a free chapter through relevant web sites. For several years, Amazon has had a program showing interior book pages, starting out as “Look Inside” and now “Search Inside the Book”. Lots of publishers participated, but didn’t instantly express a need to manage their own digital distribution
The Future of Distribution
The future of distribution” is simply too big a subject to be covered in an hour, even by a fast-talking New Yorker like me. So we’re going to focus our attention on “distribution” as defined by the companies that call themselves “distributors” and by publishers who offer “distribution services” to other publishers. That is, we’re going to talk about how it works when a publisher hands off important distribution functions to another entity