Booksquare

If you are a regular reader of Shelf Awareness (and if you’re not, you should be!), you know about the steady drumbeat of bookstores closing. You also know about the rising chorus from booksellers who are changing, adapting, growing, and understanding their place in the larger community. I am really lucky: I have two branches […]

I am honored to bring you the following post from Dominique Raccah, Publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks. The other day, I wrote an article in response to Sourcebooks’ decision to delay the ebook release of their upcoming title Bran Hambric. Behind the scenes, there was much debate on this topic, and Dominique offered her thoughts […]

We’ve got a time: 8:30 AM And a date: July 16 And a Room: The Harding Room Digital issues — from ebooks to territorial rights — are the hottest topics in publishing today. Throughout the publishing industry, changes to business-as-usual have a direct impact on authors. Traditional publishers are experimenting with formats, business models, clever […]

One of the worst-kept secrets in my household is the fact that I buy multiple copies of the same book. For myself. I am not alone in this habit, but I’ve noticed a new twist on an old concept. Last week, I observed a discussion among readers: the importance of purchasing comfort reads to store […]

It is perhaps telling that I left BookExpo America 2009 with the same feeling I had in 2006. And 2008. This time, however, there is also a layer of optimism, the product, actually, of the Publishing 3.0 presentation from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. It’s too big for a nutshell, so hang on […]

Yay New York Times, you have discovered book piracy! And it is everything your dreamed and more. Oh and look: it’s authors who have never authorized their books for the digital marketplace who are being pirated. Piracy has been a fact of our lives for as long as we’ve had marketplaces. The NYT starts with […]

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. […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]