“Scale” is a theme everybody in publishing needs to be thinking about, so...
The overarching theme of our upcoming Publishers Launch Conference at BookExpo America on May 29 is “scale”. I thank my PLC partner, Michael Cader, for urging that we label that as a core concern...
View ArticleUnbundling in the book business: the fourth big trend
A few weeks ago, I wrote that there are three big forces driving the future of publishing: scale, verticalization, and atomization. I was wrong. I had forgotten my own blogpost from last September when...
View ArticleTwo thoughts: what was one book business may divide by format and backlist...
It’s a busy week for us this week, with BookExpo America in town. We have our all-day Publishers Launch conference on Wednesday, May 29, and a solid two days of appointments on Thursday and Friday. I...
View ArticleExamining the relationship between start-ups and publishers
We are in another high-funding era for digital start-ups. The book business has always looked ripe for disruption, but never any more so than now. With bookstore shelf space shrinking, ebooks growing...
View ArticleThe truth is we do not yet know whether ebooks will work for anything except...
In the 1990s, Mark Bide would always begin the “Publishing in the 21st Century” conferences we ran by reviewing the research we had done around some aspect of digital change in publishing with the...
View ArticleIt is hard for publishers to apply even Harvard B School advice in their...
Harvard Business Review published an article recently by Benjamin Edelman called “Mastering the Intermediaries” which gives advice to businesses trying to avoid some of the consequences of audience...
View ArticleThe implications of the computer moving from the desktop to our hip pocket
Benedict Evans of Andreessen/Horowitz (an indispensible observer of digital change across media, and an analyst who explains Amazon better than any other I know) did a presentation called “Mobile is...
View ArticleAsking whether Amazon is friend or foe is a simple question that is...
I’ve been invited to join a discussion entitled “Amazon: Friend or Foe” (meaning “for publishers”) sponsored by the Digital Media Group of the Worshipful Company of Stationers (only in England!) and...
View ArticleCan crowd-sourced retailing give Amazon a run for its money?
Although it has always seemed sensible for publishers to sell their books (and then ebooks) directly to end users, it has never looked to me like that could be a very big business. In the online...
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