The departing CEO reminds us that Barnes and Noble is of interest and a...
When Barnes & Noble interrupted Holiday week day-dreaming to announce that recently elevated CEO Demos Parneros had been abruptly dismissed for a contract violation that also eliminated his...
View ArticleMedium publishes a book and gets some big PR
The New York Times carried a story on the front page of its Friday Business section about a book. This book is a novel entitled (appropriately for this piece) “The Big Disruption” by Jessica Powell. Of...
View ArticleImprint consolidation at big houses is a sign of changed times
I had reason to learn recently that Ingram has 16 million individual titles loaded in their Lightning Source database ready to be delivered as a bound book to you within 24 hours, if not sooner. So...
View ArticleThe best ways to use Lightning are not widely employed yet 20 years in
The 20th anniversary of Lightning Source, the digital service provided by Ingram that supplies both printed-on-demand books and ebook file distribution services for publishers, was recently noted in a...
View ArticleWe’ll see how what I actually learn compares to what I expect to find out
Australia and New Zealand have always been the far outposts of the English-speaking territories for book publishers based in New York and London. But the logistics and economics of managing inventory...
View ArticleAfter seeing Lightning Australia and a couple of publishers, and learning a...
Ingram’s Lightning Print operation outside of Melbourne isn’t massive (at least not yet), but it sure has a lot of capabilities. It can deliver hardbacks as well as paperbacks, color as well as just...
View ArticleNew Zealand is a beautiful country that is at the end of the line in the...
Quite aside from being stunningly beautiful from top to bottom, New Zealand is unique, a nation of 4-1/2 million English speakers that is not on the way to anyplace else. When you go to New Zealand,...
View ArticleAmazon share grows and big publishers make more money
The financial reports of the major publishers have been following a pattern for some years now. Sales are about flat but profits have been steadily rising. One explanation for that fact is that the...
View Article“The Book Business” is my new book
On Tuesday night, March 12, I’ll be enjoying a party thrown by my publisher Oxford University Press at The Strand Bookstore (email poppy.hatrick@oup.com if you want to come) for “The Book Business:...
View ArticleGetting an award and getting caught up with innovation with BISG
The Book Industry Study Group, or BISG, is a book publishing trade organization now headed by Brian O’Leary that was formed to be pan-industry. They were preceded by the Association of American...
View ArticleTamblyn sees a new era for bookselling that might be a new era for publishing...
Michael Tamblyn, who heads up the Kobo global ebook operation, delivered a brilliant talk at the BISG Annual Meeting last week. The meat of his speech was to instruct publishers in very specific terms...
View ArticleThe sale of B&N again calls the question of the future of America’s bookstores
The most important question in the world of trade publishing is “what will happen to the book trade”, meaning, primarily, the bookstores (but also the other retailers that sell books, the libraries and...
View ArticleA lot has changed in book publishing in the last ten years
I am returning this September to speak at Digital Book World, a conference I helped to found and then programmed for its first seven years. (One motivation to go back is to promote my new book.) The...
View ArticleOne big change in book publishing is that it does not require you to have...
More than two decades into its digital transition, book publishing has evolved so that a capital-intensive infrastructure is no longer a requirement to successfully develop a book, or a list of books,...
View Article7 ways book publishing will change over the next few years
A prior post described the new structure of the book publishing ecosystem. In the past three decades, we have migrated away from a world where a publisher needed to own a substantial infrastructure to...
View ArticleShould Barnes & Noble rethink its supply chain?
About 25 years ago, Ingram was benefiting from a big buildout of America’s bookstore network. Borders and Barnes & Noble were both opening new stores — big stores — at a rapid rate. Ingram hit a...
View Article2020: Zero year thoughts about the changes in book publishing
Years that end in zeroes summon a natural tendency to look backwards and forwards. So as we enter this century’s decade of The 20s, we’ll do just that. The ideas in this piece analyze what is mostly...
View ArticleWhat is causing the uptick in independent bookstores?
My first real job was in a bookstore, on the sales floor of the brand new paperback department in Brentano’s on 5th Avenue in the summer of 1962. I loved that place; I loved that job; and I’ve always...
View ArticleTwo pretty easy ways to add revenue that most publishers are missing
The biggest publishers today are regularly delivering improved profit performance on a flat or declining sales base. This masks a troubling truth about today’s book business. The core asset base of a...
View ArticleThe supply chain for book publishing is being changed by Coronavirus too
One thing the pandemic has done is to make everybody more aware of “supply chains”: the path by which a thing gets made and delivered to its ultimate user. Many of us heard many times that a ventilator...
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