Tools of Change co-hosted a TOC Executive Roundtable with Publishers Weekly on Monday that was attended by about seventy industry insiders. Moderated by John Kilkullen, formerly of Nielsen and IDG, it began with Magellan Media Founder, Brian O’Leary, offering a thoughtful argument for the industry to tackle the large issues confronting publishers in a large…Continue Reading
Over the three days of Digital Book World this week, 12 startup companies were given a chance to strut their stuff in a series of sessions called Publishers Launchpad, which had new companies pitch their business ventures in short presentations back-to-back. The first session was part of Monday’s Publishers Launch Children’s Publishing Goes Digital conference,…Continue Reading
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) just released the 2011 Edition of its Statistical Fact Book. Now in its 33rd year of publication, the book reflects changes in direct marketing, this year focusing more closely on the mobile market. Some key findings: While ereaders were marketed in 2.5% of the mobile campaigns in 2010, that number…Continue Reading
On the opening day of this year’s Tools of Change, O’Reilly VP Online, Allen Noren, kept the audience glued to their seats for two hours, revealing his secrets of “Building a Successful Direct Channel.” Noren began by explaining the need to ask a lot of questions before beginning to sell direct. The answer to ‘What…Continue Reading
This morning Lynn Andriani, who oversees PW‘s Cooking The Books e-newsletter, moderated a cookbook panel that brought out an SRO crowd, and uncovered some surprising areas of agreement and disagreement among the panelists. These included Clarkson Potter‘s Doris Cooper, EatYourBooks.com‘s Jane Kelly, Cookstr‘s Will Schwalbe, and Bruce Shaw from the Harvard Common Press. Everyone agreed…Continue Reading
As the Interactive portion of SXSW winds down and the music crowd takes over just as the rain appears, it’s time to consider what SXSW accomplished this year for publishing types—and whether it’s worth attending going forward. As Richard Nash, a newbie this year, marveled, “If there’s a tech show that is friendly to culture,…Continue Reading
A panel discussion on “Reading in a Digital Age” at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College engaged students and their elders through the dinner hour on November 11—with enough questions following the formal session, to keep the speakers tied up well past the program’s formal end time. Moderated by Bill Goldstein, founder of the New York Times…Continue Reading
In 1995, Disney’s then-CEO Michael Eisner created the Disney Institute, his commercial homage to the Chautauqua Institution, a 135-year-old center of learning and recreation in western New York that comes alive for nine weeks every year. Disney Institute, which is located on the periphery of Disney World, never became as successful as Eisner had hoped,…Continue Reading
A much-anticipated panel on children’s books at NYU‘s Summer Publishing Institute brought out an amazing array of publishing talent, with newly minted literary agent Brenda Bowen moderating. Included in the lineup were Ellie Berger, President of Scholastic Trade Publishing; Megan Tingley, Publisher of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Don Weisberg, President of Penguin’s Young…Continue Reading
On Shakespeare’s birthday, it seems only fitting to talk about the London Book Fair and what it suggests re: book publishing’s future. It was, as others have said a smaller fair than in recent years, and there were noticeably fewer Americans, with some publishers (viz Random, Scholastic) represented only by their sub rights people. A…Continue Reading
