The Future of Publishing

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 line on a per unit basis), and they’re not pretty if you’re a publisher. After modeling various scenarios, two words come to mind: creek and paddle. Amazon isn’t setting a table for one, they’re throwing a dinner party. Especially if you are trying to port […]

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 out there would be feeling some shame by now. They’re not, and maybe it’s because there is a lot more fun in playing the DRM Blame Game than in tackling the problem (acknowledging here that players in the Blame Game have legitimate points). Here’s the

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 just going to sit back and let them roll. (Before we get into the good stuff, I’d like to congratulate Teel McClanahan III of Modern Evil Pres on winning our ToC conference guest pass. And a special thank you to Fran Toolan and Doug Lessing

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 “existing strengths and publishing affinities” and how this imprint or that will be better, stronger, safer. As if that matters. Who really cares if Crown or Knopf or Ballantine or Bantam Dell survives? I’m serious. Who. Cares.

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 books that are so poorly targeted I can’t even get the cleaning crew to take them off my hands. There’s a sci-fi novel about a kilted astronaut, scores of knitting themed romances, and yet another book featuring a large breasted woman wielding an enormous sword

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 engine. Whoo-hoo! Sorry, feeling a bit sarcastic here. First glance, it looks like a big win for Google. Yes, there is that $125 million, which is parsed into various buckets, including a good sum earmarked for the creation of a “Book Rights Registry” — something

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 wonder how it is that we weren’t invaded by the Communists — it turns out they could have simply walked across the border and taken away our freedom. Territorial rights are these fun, interesting things coveted and nurtured by entertainment media. In some ways, it’s

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 next generation of ereader will surely be more of everything. Of course, the fine-tuning of the perfect ereading device is not the issue. The ebook business is building itself without the perfect device. eBooks are not going to be the next big thing; they’re going

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 Pynchon novels available in any ebook store. At least not in any of the ones I’ve checked. That includes the Kindle store, Sony Connect, Fictionwise, the Palm eBook store, and eBooks.com. I understand that most of Pynchon’s novels qualify as extreme backlist, and, as a

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 or free samples. It’s no wonder that we endure a never-ending succession of “it’s the end of the world as we know it” articles about the publishing industry. New York Magazine has given us the latest, a gloomy piece chock full of quotes from gloomy