News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 people [...]
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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, software producer Klopotek [...]
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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 seriously at advertising as [...]
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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 veterans see their industry [...]
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At the 9th Annual Education Industry Investment Forum (March 26-28), more than a hundred investors and entrepreneurs gathered to learn more about the current state of the $300B education market. As always, technology was the glue that binds. Sparknotes’ Dan Weiss joined HM’s Craig Bauer and Beth Aguiar, VP of Apollo’s University of Phoenix, to [...]
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March 2007
The increasing complexity of copyright law and the tortured definition (and abuse) of “fair use” provoked the Metropolitan Museum of Art to host its second workshop on the subject at the College Art Association’s annual NY conference in February. Co-sponsored by the CAA, it was followed by a highly instructive (albeit complex) panel on fair [...]
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