News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
With the holiday sales war over and all new devices already out on the market, much of January consisted of tallying up the sales numbers and looking to new developments in the new year. There have already been some big announcements: Apple’s digital textbook publishing, a possible spinoff of the Nook from Barnes & Noble, [...]
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August 2011
A new horse entered the e-reader race this past month, creating intrigue, though not a lot of fear, among its competitors. The iRiver Story represents the first e-reader that is integrated with Google eBooks, which gives it a bit of clout. But while the iRiver Story’s HD display with eInk technology helps ranks its screen [...]
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June was a busy month for e-reader coverage, as the unveiling of the All-New Nook from Barnes & Noble at the end of May inspired a changing of the tide for the Little E-reader That Could, propelling a once-clumsy model into the lead with reviewers in the e-reader arms race thanks to its affordable price [...]
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Laura Hazard Owen | July 2010
The 3 million iPads sold as of June were a major topic of discussion at two conferences this month: The Big Money’s Untethered 2010: Profitable Media in the Tablet Era, and the Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference. Untethered was aimed more directly at book publishers, and its “Future of Book Publishing” panel included publishing head [...]
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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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Lorraine Shanley | April 2009
Much has been written about this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, where game developers rubbed shoulders with web marketers, and the publishers that attended were confronted at one panel by exasperated authors and bloggers. But now that the bytes have settled (or healed, as the case may be), what are the useful takeaways? Most [...]
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Laura Hazard Owen | February 2009
It’s hard to remember a time when Netflix didn’t seem like a good idea. The company opened its first distribution center, in San Jose, CA, in 1998, and initially aimed to create the typical Blockbuster experience: Each rental was $4, plus $2 for postage, and there were late fees. In a 2002 interview with Wired [...]
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February 2007
The digital conference that Google hosted on January 18 was definitely in the plus ça change mode: the crowd was made up of miscellaneous enthusiasts, with hardly a senior publisher in sight; the speakers were articulate and clever, mostly male and certain they were preaching to the uninitiated (though those may well be the ones [...]
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October 2005
WOM’s The Word As Podcasts, Blogging, Buzz & Viral Go Mainstream Although the book publishing industry as a whole has yet to go viral in the way of blockbusters or burgers (Have you “crashed” the Wedding Crashers trailer or Had It Your Way with Burger King‘s Subservient Chicken?), many in the industry say they’re not [...]
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December 2001
PEOPLE Congrats to Phyllis Grann — and Random House — who have finally tied the knot in what is perhaps the last good news of ’01? Word is that not all publishers there are equally excited, leading to speculation about whether the last card has yet been played. Back at Penguin Putnam, Adrian Zackheim has [...]
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