Articles from January 2010

Amazon, Macmillan, Agency Models, and Quality (Oh My)

January 31st, 2010 · 27 Comments

Be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it. Consumer expectations will rise if prices do Over the weekend, we rode a rollercoaster as Macmillan laid out its demands for ebook pricing to Amazon, and Amazon responded by pulling (nearly) all Macmillan titles from its store. Late Sunday, Amazon announced they would […]

File Under: Non-Traditional Publishing

What Are Enhanced Ebooks?

January 19th, 2010 · 61 Comments

Short answer: nobody knows. Longer answer: the magic elixir publishers are injecting into ebooks in hopes they will entice people to pay higher prices. As you might guess, I am a bit of an “enhancement” skeptic. I have a few reasons. First, they feel like an attempt to skip the walking phase. Right now ebooks […]

File Under: Non-Traditional Publishing

Tools of Change, or The Future of Publishing Isn’t What You Think It Is

January 11th, 2010 · 6 Comments

Today is the final day for early registration for the Tools of Change for Publishing conference, to be held in New York, February 22 – 24, 2010. Recently, there have been a lot of conferences dedicated to the magical world of digital publishing, but this is the only conference focused on looking forward. It may […]

File Under: The Future of Publishing

William Styron and Droit de Seigneur

January 4th, 2010 · 22 Comments

Over the New Year holiday, Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, published an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times titled “There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen”. I think he started with the intent of justifying the cost of ebooks — something publishing has handled abysmally — but he took a […]

File Under: The Future of Publishing