MP3 Audio Is the Next Big Thing. Unless It’s Audiobook Suicide. The average Los Angeles motorist now spends 136 hours per year sitting stock-still in traffic, according to the landmark Texas Transportation Institute study, and audiobook publishers are thrilled. Indeed, the apocalyptic fate of our nation’s highway infrastructure is rehearsed by audio industry brass with…Continue Reading
PT’s Savvy Commentators Ponder the Fallout from Another Year in Publishing As we surveyed the smoking turf from another twelve months in the book business, it struck us that this year’s pinnacles and pratfalls were decidedly in the eye of the beholder. We asked a number of savvy publishing personalities to offer their take on…Continue Reading
While much of the literary world mopes about sluggish trade book sales and a flat-lined readership, an industry group in Holland has jettisoned their melancholy and mounted a frontal assault on blasé book buying. Aggressively luring readers and making bestsellers in the bargain, this Dutch treat just might be a model for other nations in…Continue Reading
Not surprisingly, 1999 — a year which occurred in that surreal interlude before anyone could imagine the impact of April 2000’s dot-com dump — was a year when everything came up “e”. And, as we glance at our prognostications of last year, we find that Publishing Trends exhorted publishers to embrace the opportunities that were…Continue Reading
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (12/6/00) When Stephen King pulled the plug last week on his online serial story The Plant, citing a dwindling base of readers willing to pony up a buck for the latest installment, pundits rushed to declare electronic self-publishing dead on arrival. But many of them failed to notice that King’s supposed…Continue Reading
Crime and Punishment King Bites the Bullet, Crime Pays in New Zealand, and Carvalho’s on the Case in Spain In a somewhat bizarre development, Stephen King’s hotly downloaded e-novella Riding the Bullet has shot around the globe — in a bricks-and-mortar edition. Though hard-copy versions of the work were originally ruled out by the K-man,…Continue Reading
When it comes to selling baseball books, you won’t find any curve balls at the Baseball Online Library, a vast repository of searchable baseball lore that recently began featuring excerpts from new and backlisted titles, with links directly to that major-league slugger, Amazon.com. As the first sales from the site were batted home last month,…Continue Reading
