Booksquare

I have been thinking for days, weeks, months, heck, years about ebook pricing and traditional publishers. Just for fun last week, I ran some numbers using the general figures from Bob Miller in the comments on his ebook pricing post*, plus a guesstimate of 12% general overhead (high or low, doesn’t really change the bottom […]

I’d like to note that Digital Rights Management has won the “Big Bad” title at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference for three years in a row! In today’s market and economy, that’s a major accomplishment. Congratulations to DRM for being the most hated aspect of digital publishing in 2009! You’d think the DRM folks […]

Some people go to Disneyland, Booksquare goes to New York for the Tools of Change conference. This year, I’m especially excited because I’m moderating the best panel of the conference: Smart Women Read eBooks, featuring the fabulous Angela James from Samhain Publishing, Malle Vallik of Harlequin, and Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. I’m […]

If you’re in the publishing industry, today’s news about cuts and layoffs and reorgs and whatnot was devastating. Nobody was safe. Not Thomas Nelson, not Simon & Schuster, not Irwyn Applebaum. You start to look around. Who’s next? At Random House, it was clear that saving the imprints was key. Markus Dohle talked about aligning […]

I’ll be blunt. Life in the Booksquare mail room has not been kind to me since my last post. In the last few weeks I’ve been inundated with more books than ever before. It’s almost as if some of you took my complaint as a challenge. In the past week alone I’ve received dozens of […]

After years of to-ing and fro-ing, Google and the Authors Guild/Association of American Publishers have reached a settlement regarding Google’s BookSearch program. Yes. It’s true. For a mere $125 million (pocket change, really, for Google), the program is back on track and the publishing industry is ready to play nice with the world’s largest search […]

Once upon a time, we lived in this lovely world where countries were separated by vast oceans and passports were needed to cross into new regions. Children like me imagined that countries were carefully cordoned off, fences or laser beams or something (land sharks?) protecting territorial rights. Now that I know it’s not true, I […]

Except for the annoying crashes that require hard restarts (which require the acquisition of a paper clip), I’m pretty happy with the Kindle reading experience. It’s not a device that will light the world on fire, nor is it the “iPod of ereaders” (stop with the dumbness, people). It’s a good gateway device, however. The […]

Not long ago I was lamenting the fact that it was literally impossible to read Thomas Pynchon on a Kindle. It’s not because the Kindle isn’t suited to reading long and complex novels, but rather the fact that there are no Pynchon novels to be found in the Kindle store. In fact, there are no […]

If you examine it on the whole, the publishing industry is an unsustainable mess. Think about it: bad economic theory, out-of-touch decision making, Peter paying Paul or the piper or someone, deregulated approach to the market. Hmm, sounds like another entity we know, doesn’t it? The future of publishing is not about technology or widgets […]