The Business of Publishing

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 be the greatest of ironies that the problems facing publishers today have nothing to do with finding people who want to read. People are reading (and writing) like never before. They’re publishing like never before. The pace of publishing innovations tells me this trend will

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 wrong turn. Into some very interesting territory. Let’s break it down. The first line of the article is “What is an e-book?” This is never answered because Galassi moves on to discuss the decision by William Styron’s heirs to move Styron’s digital rights from Random

For your reading enjoyment, I have compiled a list of about a dozen things that will not save publishing. I have also created a brief list of things that will save publishing. As always, neither list is comprehensive, and I reserve the right to add items if I think of something while I’m in the shower. For what it’s worth, publishing is alive, well, and bigger than ever! It’s obvious we’re seeing more creativity, more innovation, more ways of connecting people and reading. When we talk about “saving publishing”, we need to be very clear. We are talking about book

Has there ever been an industry more unwilling to make its customers happy than publishing? Simon & Schuster and Hachette have (independently) decided they’re going to hold back the ebook releases of some titles. Not all of course. Most likely just the ones they paid far too much for anyway. They’re taking a stand by creating marketplace confusion…some books yes, some books no. Consumers will need to guess. Gee, that’s a good idea. But not a problem for me. If the book isn’t available, I’ll buy something else. I won’t be checking back in three or four months, because, well,

Dear Mr. Sobel, While I do not know you, I am impressed by your resume and the portrait of you with what appears to be a brown tabby. I generally cut cat lovers more slack — and brown tabby owners…they get a free pass, as a rule — but I cannot do so in this instance. You are wrong. You have “challenged” publishers to hold back e-reprints (I presume you are making the case for the ebook as a secondary market of some sort), and you make no bones about, as Richard Curtis states, “giving hardcovers their moment in the

For the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about Digital Rights Management (“DRM”), and the diversity of comments have been fascinating. I still do not believe DRM prevents or slows piracy*. Add to this fact that public perception of DRM, honed by years of abuse by the music industry, is negative…or rather, though most people do not know nor use the terms “digital rights management” or “DRM”, they hate it when they encounter it. There are genuine concerns on both side of the DRM issue. (Oh, and do they hate it! This is a serious challenge for the industry.) Managing

If there are two truths we hold to be self-evident, they are these: 1) DRM does nothing to stop piracy, and 2) DRM, as used by many publishers today, frustrates legitimate purchasers of books. This leads many to conclude that DRM does not work, and that DRM is evil. How do we get past “it’s good” or “it’s evil”? Not true. And not true. Consumers will happily accept the shackles of DRM if the trade-off is worth it to them. For example, while some Kindle users grumble about loss of rights, they express joy at the ease of purchase created