Category Archives: Featured Articles

Digital Reference, En Garde!

“The one thing we know is that information is now ever-present and therefore, in a sense, valueless,” says Kemp Battle, partner in the investment and consulting firm Tucker Capital. And that explains in a nutshell the challenges currently wracking the boardrooms of the world’s reference publishers, who, with their multi-volume encyclopedias and high-price-point dictionaries, are…Continue Reading

Is Borders Set to Gain on Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (10/16/00) For years Borders has been known to publishing folk as a well-run but insular company located in the wilds of Ann Arbor, Mich. It tends to be publicity averse, even secretive in its dealings. Though it had been every bit as aggressive as its main competitor, Barnes & Noble, in…Continue Reading

Laptops in Book Country

“A book, e-book, any book!” is the inclusive theme for this month’s New York Is Book Country, and in the spirit of platform promiscuity, e-reading appurtenances will be out in force. For the first time, according to NYIBC president Linda Exman, the fair will feature a New Technology Pavilion to give an expected 250,000 attendees…Continue Reading

Audio Abundance?

Untangling the Very Tangled World of Audio Rights However much the print world is suffering as it stares down proliferating e-formats and their rights, the audiobook world’s been there, and done that. With cassette, CD, and now streaming media all up for grabs in a variety of permutations, many of them farmed out to different…Continue Reading

International Bestsellers

Trading Places Guillou Turns Publisher, Potter Imposter in Spain, and Bridget Jones Down Under The prolific writer-turned-publisher Jan Guillou has commandeered the top three slots in Sweden this month, all of them part of his journey through the Middle Ages. At the top of the heap is the third in his trilogy based on the…Continue Reading

New York Is Book Country — But So Are Seattle, Santa Fe and Amarillo

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (9/18/00) This week marks the beginning of the 22nd year of New York is Book Country, one of the oldest and largest American book fairs. Typically, New Yorkers think the publishing business begins and ends in this city, and with 350 writers, more than 200 exhibits — including a new technology…Continue Reading

Discounts on the Danube

Battle Over Price Maintenance Roils The European Book Trade In case there was any doubt about it, German culture minister Michael Naumann will not go gently into his country’s cultural good night. Portraying himself to the media as a lonely lookout on the prow of the Titanic, scanning for the iceberg that will plunge German…Continue Reading

Cader’s Media Meal

What began as a humble “public service” snack is swiftly plumping up to a full-meal deal for Michael Cader, the book packager and compulsive web-surfer behind Publishers Lunch, a free daily email news digest for the book biz. Launched last April and based at www.publisherslunch.com, the service has already been promoted as the publishing industry’s…Continue Reading

How Business Books Can Be Dirty Business

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (8/8/00) As publishers clucked over General Electric CEO Jack Welch‘s vertigo-inducing $7.1 million advance — right on the heels of former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin‘s $3.3 million one– it was only too obvious that business books have become, well, big business. In fact, business book sales in the professional category rocketed…Continue Reading

Brinkmanship at Borders

Is Borders’ “go-slow” approach to the online marketplace really a stroke of brilliance after all, as the Wall Street Journal recently postulated? The argument goes like this: despite the company’s listless approach to the Internet, which drove investors so bonkers that Borders rolled out the auction block earlier this year in search of a buyout…Continue Reading