The Future of Publishing

I remain bemused by authors who insist, when refusing to grant ebook rights, that their works are meant to be experienced in a certain (bound and printed) format. It’s a bit quaint, when you think about it, that they would impose their own vision of art on the beholder — it’s a bit like Michelangelo insisting that we only view the ceiling of Sistine Chapel while supine, X feet away from the work. It’s insanity to suggest someone should carve these rights in stone now. It is not how the artist creates the work that defines the experience: it is […]

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,

Last night, I had dinner with the digital team from Harlequin — one of the most, if not the most, forward looking publishers when it comes to migrating to a digital future — and came away feeling positive about the mindset of the industry. Today, I’m feeling like we’ve taken two steps back. The fine folks at Hachette, the parent company of Little, Brown, have decided to delay the ebook release of Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn until 24 hours after the print edition went on sale.

Associated Press headline: “Apple sells 1 million iPhones in first 3 days”. Add to that the six million phones already in the hands of customers (all of whom, I should note, chose to update their software…right when I was updating mine). Doing some quick, nearly caffeine-free math, that’s 7 million web-enabled, application-ready phones in the wild. Now is the time for bold, decisive, maybe even counterintuitive action. And counting. In March of this year, Apple released the Software Developer’s Kit (aka SDK) with hopes that people would create cool tools for the iPhone. This wasn’t a clever ploy to gin

Wow, usually it’s the government dumping news on Friday; you don’t expect it from Microsoft, but here you have it: they’re discontinuing their Live Book Search project. Effective, well, now. They say: Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes. This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize

It has been suggested that I am in love with new concepts, new media. It’s true. I am absolutely in love with “new” media models (as opposed to new media models, though I am very fond of those as well). As an old media person who has witnessed successes and failures and inefficiencies, I am excited to see people shaking up existing business models because, like our outdated laws, the current models don’t reflect the reality on the ground. To entice the talent needed to keep publishing viable in the future, the economic model must change. I figure it’s going

There are sacred cows in publishing. Lots and lots of sacred cows. You have the “smell of books” people. You have “the publishing business model ain’t broke” people. And you have the “advances are divine rights” people. Suggest that advances are not written-in-stone obligations on the part of publishers and you’re considered naive. Ill-informed. Nutso. HarperCollins has proposed a radical shift in the business. Yeah, well, I was accused of all that and more when I suggested that publishers, if they could, stop paying advances to authors. The genesis of my speculation came on the heels ofGuy Hands, the new

It is no secret that I hate publisher websites. The vast majority of them can be best described as “suffers from multiple personality disorder”. And I’m not just talking about the fact that publishers can’t figure out who the target audience of their site is. Visiting a publisher site means being subjected to bad design, bad search, and — yes — bad content. Not a single one of these is forgivable. Are you just serving up the same old book blurb they can get anywhere else with less hassle? I imagine that most of the industry is working frantically to

I have a serious question for you. What if thousands of kids were reading and writing and nobody bothered to notice? I swear it’s happening. We are raising a nation of readers, writers, artists, and even activists. Better, we are raising a nation of communicators. Now we have nurture and protect this new wonder. I’m serious. All of you are, in some way or another, connected with the world of publishing. If you want to reach readers, you need to offer content that reaches these readers where they are — online. If you’re seeking writers and artists, what comes over