Articles from March 2009

If I Were A Gatekeeper

March 23rd, 2009 · 27 Comments

Looking back, the worst part about the New Think panel at South by Southwest was not the lack of new thinking. It was the sense that the panelists didn’t have a plan for executing on the audience comments. There was no discussion, no follow-up questions, no suggestion that something would come from the audience-as-focus-group approach. […]

File Under: The Future of Publishing

New Think? Not So Much

March 15th, 2009 · 65 Comments

Nutshell analysis of the “New Think for Old Publishers” panel at South by Southwest 2009: there was a not a single new think in the room. Let me be clear. Absolutely clear. Not one word spoken in that session, either from the panelists or from the audience, was new or innovative. (This is ironic given […]

File Under: The Future of Publishing

The Week That Was: Kindle, Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, and Fictionwise

March 6th, 2009 · 27 Comments

Used to be that working the d-book (digital book) beat was an easy gig. You could go years without any news of note. Lately, you can’t go to bed for fear of missing a story. Digital books might not be a major revenue item on the P&L, but they’re the hottest story in Pub Town. […]

File Under: The Future of Publishing

Authors Guild Gives Amazon the Perfect Alibi

March 2nd, 2009 · 6 Comments

As controversies go, the Authors Guild vs. Kindle didn’t last long. Last Tuesday, Guild President Roy Blount, Jr. was fuming about infringement of digital audio rights in the New York Times. By Friday afternoon Amazon announced that it would allow publishers to disable Kindle’s text-to-speech (TTS) feature on a title by title basis. Some fear […]

File Under: The Future of Publishing