News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
Laura Hazard Owen | March 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 for [...]
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December 2009
Publishing Trends thanks marketing consultant Rich Kelley for this piece. What’s the new frontier for targeted online ads? Could the long tail go bankrupt? What does social media offer that social networks don’t? Publishers, advertisers, and service providers flocked to ad:tech at the Javits Center in early November for three days of 60 panels and [...]
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[This is a guest post by Rich Kelley, a New York–based marketing consultant. Follow him on Twitter here. Thanks, Rich!] Tim Armstrong, AOL’s new CEO, divides internet history into three phases. The first phase was about access—remember dial-up modems and limited bandwidth? The second phase, when browsers and search engines competed for eyeballs, was about [...]
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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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March 2007
Like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, the passage to the digital realm can be a vulnerable and tremulous thing. Nowhere is this more evident than in the quantum mechanical realm of trade ebooks. The problem du jour: can ONIX, the electronic standard used for the last five years to send bibliographic data (title, author, [...]
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February 2004
Far-Flung Regional Houses Hit the Heartland Bull’s-Eye Just one word: scrapbooking. Yes, scrapbooking is the fastest-growing hobby sector in the United States, with sales of related supplies — presumably including books — quadrupling in the past five years to an estimated $2 billion, as the New York Times recently noted, and projected to grow as [...]
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August 2003
Like most publishers’ ebook expectations in this deflated era of digital publishing, Seven Stories Press had fairly unspectacular ones. They dutifully digitized their files. They hung out their e-shingle. They even wrangled a way to sell ebooks directly from their site. And the results trickled in. “Tiny” is the word one executive used. Even Noam [...]
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December 2002
It was not so long ago — well, 2000, actually — that the age of ebooks ascended upon us, an era that would, as the AAP and Andersen Consulting then dreamily proclaimed, be “a significant opportunity” for the book biz, devouring almost 10% of the total consumer publishing market by 2005 and bloating into “total [...]
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June 2002
Ebooks are: (a) dead (b) undead (c) other. If you answered “all of the above,” you are more correct than you know. As spring turns to summer, not just the trees but oddly enough ebooks — through whose black heart the New York Times drove a stake last fall — are sprouting. Palm, which has [...]
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May 2002
Now that a flock of formerly high-flying technology vendors has gone down in flames (Reciprocal and Digital Goods: remember them?), it may seem odd that a 50-person business based in London should be winging toward the publishing sector. But that’s just what SealedMedia is doing, having scored $16.5 million in a third round of funding [...]
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