News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
Laura Hazard Owen | March 2011
Google was getting worse. Complaints about its search results began to appear regularly online slightly over a year ago. In December 2009, venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky blogged about the difficulty of finding helpful dishwasher reviews online. He said the experience reminded him of the pre-Google era when search was “completely overwhelmed by spam and info-clutter.” [...]
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Lorraine Shanley | February 2011
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 [...]
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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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Laura Hazard Owen | December 2009
Though we’ve recently noticed a few more Kindles on the subway, mobile phones are infinitely more common. As more consumers choose to read e-books on their smartphones rather than purchase standalone e-reading devices, publishers are working to create apps and other iPhone-ready content. Flurry, a company that provides analytics to mobile phone application developers, found [...]
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The afternoon panels and presentations at yesterday’s International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) Digital Book 2009 were filled with promises of impending hardware and software innovations. Sony Director of Business Development Bob Nell talked about the number of outlets that will be selling the Sony Reader next Christmas–6,000, which is double last year’s number–and hinted that [...]
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Laura Hazard Owen | March 2009
“Twitter is really the stupidest thing in the world,” Chris Brogan, blogger and social media expert, said in his Blogging and Social Media panel at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishers conference in February. But he didn’t mean it. At first blush, Twitter does seem like a dumb idea. It describes itself as “a [...]
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On the final day of TOC, Tim O’Reilly gave his keynote, following on the heels of the inventive Nick Bilton from the NYT’s R&D labs. (Bilton created the interactive website for David Carr’s book.) Much of what he discussed was focused on the topic that was subsequently addressed at the next session, where a group [...]
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