Chelsea Green And The Great Big Mistake

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Here we are in 2008 and Chelsea Green, a small publisher, took a chance. It thought, “Hmm, offer an exclusive window to Amazon for our new book on Barack Obama, or choose broad distribution? We choose Amazon, and Amazon alone.” Which, of course, angered all the other booksellers in the world, the booksellers who see Amazon as both usurper and competition. It was a calculated risk that smacks of someone forgetting to carry the ones. On paper, this probably seemed brilliant. Amazon has great distribution. By working with BookSurge, a division of Amazon, print runs could be managed. The problem,

The Future of Publishing

On The Future

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It might seem understandable if the publishing industry comes to view digital books as a threat, since their business is currently based on the concept of one copy, one sale — a business model that will be obsolete once books go digital. But if we play our cards right, and can convince book sellers and publishers to embrace this new technology, we could end up living in a world where it’s actually easier for writers to get paid, and where any book can be accessed instantly from any place on the planet — universal access to knowledge. Hasn’t that been

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