News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
Laura Hazard Owen | February 2010
“If you don’t eat your own children, someone else will”: That’s how Michael Mace, Principal of the Silicon Valley–based Rubicon Consulting, began his presentation, “Check Out My Scars: Seven Lessons from the Failure of E-Books in 2000, and What They Mean to the Future of Electronic Publishing,” at the 2010 O’Reilly Tools of Change [...]
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April 2009
PT thanks New York–based marketing consultant Rich Kelley for his reporting.
Social media and search had quite a mashup at this year’s Search Engine Strategies Conference. For three days, 5500 attendees alternated between panels on social media optimization strategies, talks on Google’s new AdWords interface, tuning websites for search, and much more. For its opening keynote, [...]
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January 2009
David Rothman
Founder, Teleread.org
Sure, Oprah loves the Kindle, Amazon’s gizmo for reading electronic books, even if it looks a bit like a Soviet-made adding machine. And a second model probably will be on the way—in fact, perhaps two. We just might see an econo-Kindle and a large-screened version for students. Forbes is so excited about [...]
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PT thanks New York-based marketing consultant Rich Kelley for this report.
“Content is no longer something you hand down from on high on a sacred tablet,” advised John Byrne, editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek. Today it’s more like “a campfire that you use to gather people. What becomes important is what then happens among the people.” The editors [...]
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October 2008
PT thanks New York–based marketing consultant Rich Kelley for his reporting.
“What we have today is the tyranny of more,” warned Mike Linton, CMO of eBay. “More choices, more technology, more competition, more alliances, more complexity, more risk.” “The Internet is run on love,” mused Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of [...]
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September 2008
Mike Shatzkin is the Founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Company, Inc.
Cloud computing is the term for using computing resources that don’t sit on your desktop, but reside somewhere out on the Internet. The computer resources in “the cloud” could be storage capacity—hard drive space where you are storing data bits that you “own”—or [...]
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November 2007
Aggregation is so 2006. The new web is all about distributed media, and widgets are the new web’s wunderkind. With widgets, users can easily remix, repost, and share chunked content, making them a popular (and rapidly growing) marketing tool. According to ComScore, more than 48% of all US internet users – over 87 million [...]
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July 2007
During summer’s first month, the much debated future of publishing was, well, debated some more at venues across the country. The much-reported O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in San Jose, featured an array of stellar presentations running the gamut from “the book is dead,” to “the book is gloriously alive!”
Back east, [...]
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May 2007
With ads appearing on everything from cup holders to subway risers to (ok, to use an extreme case) people’s skin, books remain one of the last of the ad-free sacred spaces. Other than the occasional unsuccessful attempt at inserts (1970’s cigarette ads) and product placement (Bulgari anyone?), publishing has never looked [...]
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April 2007
You could call them secret shoppers. Like the plainclothes informants who check out department stores for a lapse in customer service, publishers who slip on authors’ shoes return from their writing experience armed with anecdotes and tips that market research can’t devine. What many intelligencers see shocks them. Even thirty-year publishing [...]
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