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Ideas about the future of bookselling
There is a vision of online bookselling, which I share, which is that it will become increasingly atomized. Books (and, ultimately, other content too) will be merchandised in unique ways across...
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Some ideas for publishers that will help bookstores; other suggestions that...
This is the fourth of a series of posts on bookstores and their future. The previous posts have covered the challenges of buying (proposing VMI as a possible solution), explored what we should expect...
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Is trade publishing’s situation more like the newspapers or more like the...
It has been an important tenet of my thinking about digital change in the book business to understand that books are different from other media — music, TV, movies, newspapers, magazines — as we try to...
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How much time and effort should established publishers be spending on startups?
We are now in a period replete with startups that want to be the disruption in publishing. We see a lot of them in our office. Part of our business involves helping startups find relevance and contacts...
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Publishers are reshaping themselves
It was reported last week that Hyperion plans to sell off its “backlist” to focus its attention on new titles it will develop in conjunction with its corporate cousins at Disney and ABC. This follows...
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Atomization: publishing as a function rather than an industry
The announcement of what amounts to the first book publishing program spawned by Google demonstrates a paradigm we’re seeing repeatedly. It suggests a sweeping change in publishing from how we’ve known...
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More on atomization: why the new publishers are coming
The most recent post here laid out a future for trade publishing that will be less and less about traditional publishers and more and more about non-traditional publishers delivering books into the...
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The three forces that are shaping 21st century book publishing: scale,...
There are three overarching realities that are determining the future course of book publishing. They are clear and they are inexorable: Scale, and its close cousin “critical mass”, is the ability to...
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Vendor-managed inventory: why it is more important than ever
The idea of vendor-managed inventory has never become particularly popular in the book business, despite a few experiments over the years where it was implemented with great success. (And despite the...
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How the ebook evolution might get started in other places
The organizers of the Buenos Aires Book Fair, which will run for the next few weeks, invited me to speak at an opening session of their event last Friday. They left the topic completely up to me. What...
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Unbundling in the book business: the fourth big trend
A few weeks ago, I wrote that there are three big forces driving the future of publishing: scale, verticalization, and atomization. I was wrong. I had forgotten my own blogpost from last September when...
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Further ruminations about the complex notion of scale in publishing
Our May 29 conference is built around the theme of “scale” in our business, which means something different than it did a very short time ago. Usually “using scale” means “employing the competitive...
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What I was thinking when I said that wild stuff
At our Publishers Launch Conference on the Wednesday of BEA, Michael Cader and I introduced a new feature we think will become regular at our events: a candid 1-on-1 conversation between us. It went...
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Anybody Press is the new member of the Big Six (for ebooks, at least)
Bowker reported last week that 12% of the ebooks being bought now are self-published. There was skepticism about the methodology from The Digital Reader and Good e-Reader says Bowker’s data should be...
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Publisher margins today may be enviable, but it will be a big challenge to...
The major publishers have apparently worked themselves into a very strong commercial position at the moment with the transition to ebooks. I say “apparently” because the data that gives the most recent...
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An innocent story with dramatic implications
It’s a holiday weekend in America, but they’re working in the UK. A story posted by The Bookseller today really caught my eye. It says that Hachette UK is seeing “nearly half” of its sales taking place...
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The future of books in stores
The future for books in retail stores is not unified; it’s dispersed. To the extent that there continue to be bookstores (and although shelf space in them will continue to decline inexorably, they’ll...
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No book market looks like an English-speaking market yet; might Germany be next?
Although ebooks are seen as the symbol of “disruption” in the trade book marketplace, they’re really just a part of it and they’re the trailing component, not the leading edge. Online sales of print...
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The totality of the relationship is what matters
Like a marriage, relationships between people and companies are seldom made or broken on the back of one transaction or one kind of transaction. They are bigger and more complicated than that. That...
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Finding the right digital services is today’s challenge for publishers
The era of digital change in publishing has given rise to a slew of service propositions to help publishers with their new infrastructure needs. This is both essential and also nothing new. It has...
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