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Amazon channels Orwell in its latest blast
Anybody who reads Amazon’s latest volley in the Amazon-Hachette war and then David Streitfeld’s takedown of it on the New York Times’s web site will know that Amazon — either deliberately or with...
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This is a teamwork play that could really give Amazon a headache if they got...
I will admit that I have long been among those who believe that Amazon has what amounts to an enduring stranglehold on the book business. They have achieved a market share — which could be in the...
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Is the new Amazon acquisition something publishers need to think about or not?
If you’re like me, you know a thing or two about the book business but you didn’t know there was a business called Twitch until you heard the announcement this morning that Amazon had bought it for...
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Marketing the author properly is a challenge for the book publishing business
A few years ago, trying to explain the difference between how books had weathered digital change compared to other media, I formulated the paradigm of the “unit of appreciation” and the “unit of sale”....
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What makes books different…
Before the digital age, retailers that tried to sell across media were pretty rare. Barnes & Noble added music CDs to their product mix when the era of records and cassettes had long passed. Record...
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Big publisher bashing again with fictional facts
The estimable Clay Shirky has written a lengthy piece called “Amazon, Publishers, and Readers” on medium.com saying, essentially, that an Amazon-dominated world would be an improvement over the Big...
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Are Amazon exclusives the next big challenge for everybody else in publishing?
Somebody smarter (or more patient about wading through data) than I am could probably figure out how far along this bifurcation is already, but Amazon is doing its very best to build a body of content...
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Export sales is one of the few areas of predictable growth for book publishers
For a client meeting last week, I was shown a chart that came from Bookstats of channel revenue for publishers. Bookstats is the recent (and now no longer) partnership between the AAP and BISG...
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Print book retailing economics and ebook retailing economics have almost...
There has been a lot of conversation lately about the differences between wholesale pricing and agency pricing for ebooks and about what constitutes a “fair” division of revenue between publishers and...
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Krugman cites a fact that fit what I posited as a theory
In a Shatzkin Files blog about the Amazon-Hachette dispute that I posted on July 15, I wrote this: The “damage” to society that results from results being gamed in fiction is probably minimal, and...
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The implications of the computer moving from the desktop to our hip pocket
Benedict Evans of Andreessen/Horowitz (an indispensible observer of digital change across media, and an analyst who explains Amazon better than any other I know) did a presentation called “Mobile is...
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The support infrastructure for entities to publish is growing but the most...
I remember a song lyric from the early 70s for which the opening line was: “we don’t need more sailors, we need a captain”. (I can’t find the reference in LyricFind and I don’t remember the name of the...
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Amazon and Hachette have settled so there will be no big bang change in the...
It looks like Big Publishing will maintain its grip, which the most zealous of the indie author militia refer to as a “cartel”, on major authors and big books for another several years. What looked...
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Getting books more retail shelf space is going to require a new approach
That bookstore shelf space is disappearing is a reality that nobody denies. It makes sense that there are people trying to figure out how to arrest the decline. There has been some recent cheerleading...
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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...
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Headliners galore will address Digital Book World 2015
Half of Digital Book World is delivered to the entire audience from the Main Stage. The speakers for 2015 comprise the most illustrious group we have ever had. The headine is definitely that we have...
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End of a year, and perhaps the end of a stage of the ebook transition
The year ends with a front-page New York Times story reporting the consternation in the indie author community at the current state of their commercial lives at Amazon. The proximate cause of distress...
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Kids book publishers need to massage their data to understand where their...
The day before Digital Book World (which this year was last Tuesday, January 13th), we organize a conference about publishing for young people called Publishers Launch Kids. Because my involvement with...
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No, the Big Five are not a cartel and it really ignores reality to label them...
One of the best-attended breakout sessions of Digital Book World 2015 was the discussion called “Should Amazon Be Constrained, and Can they Be?” which shared the very last slot on the two day program....
View ArticleDoing SEO right requires research into the audience, not maximum knowledge of...
There is a core point that Pete McCarthy made clear to us when we first started working with him on digital marketing challenges a year or so ago, which, critical though it is, seems extremely...
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