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Can big publishers actually do tech and make books at the same time?
Something caught my eye this week that has been very little commented upon elsewhere: the news that Hachette Book Group developed an app-making capability that they are now licensing out. Their first...
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Show me the data!
One thing we try to do at Digital Book World is to present our audiences with useful, relevant, and, when we can, original data. It is a familiar complaint in our industry that we drive blind. Part of...
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Explaining my skepticism about the likelihood of success for a general...
In a prior post, I observed that the apparently-successful subscription offerings for books were in niches. And I said I believed that a more general subscription model wouldn’t work for ebooks the way...
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DBW lets us look at ebook bestsellers by price, and things are revealed
Digital Book World unveiled its new ebook bestseller lists this morning. They put this effort together — I program the annual January conference for them; this work has almost nothing to do with me...
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Full-service publishers are rethinking what they can offer
At lunch a few months ago, Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins, expressed dissatisfaction with the term “legacy” to describe the publishers who had been successful since before the digital...
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Hats off to Amazon
When the story of how Amazon came to dominate the consumer book business is written ten years from now, there will need to be a chapter entitled “September 6, 2012″. Of course, that was the day that...
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“Platforms” are not exclusively the purview of Kindle, NOOK, and other retailers
I am recently awakened to the importance of “platforms” in our dynamic digital publishing world. Some could say I’m slow on this one (and they’d be right). Perhaps it is the “to the man with a hammer...
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Seven-and-a-half days of conference programming coming up during 4 days in...
Blog posts have been scarcer for the past couple of months because I’ve been so engaged with a major responsibility: putting together what amounts to 7-1/2 days of conference programming that will be...
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What to watch for in 2013
Although “digital change in publishing” has a year that lags the calendar year and this year won’t “end” until we have a read on how post-Christmas ebook sales were affected by the new devices...
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Taking book marketing where the book readers are likely to be
Digital marketers who want to sell books are increasingly turning to the virtual places where readers cluster. This includes marketing through the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,...
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The Digital Book World program this year covers the waterfront of the digital...
(This is a longer-than-usual Shatzkin Files post reviewing the topics and speakers for the 26 breakout sessions at DBW 2015. It serves as a checklist of “things to think about right now” for book...
View ArticleFour of the big five have new deals with Amazon and only the biggest is still...
A reporter called earlier this week focused on what he figures are the upcoming negotiations over trading terms between Amazon and Penguin Random House. I had observed when Amazon was throwing sharp...
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