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What will be the big digital issues in January 2011?
I have found a way to describe the difference between the Digital Book World conference we organize for F+W Media and the O’Reilly conference Tools of Change which I believe is accurate and is...
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Trade publishing isn’t one business and it needs more than one strategy
A dispute broke out on Brantley’s list this morning and I’m in a distinct minority. Maybe a minority of only a bit more than one. The brouhaha started with observations about ebook pricing, with some...
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Don’t drown walking across the river
An aphorism that I picked up years ago that crosses my mind frequently in my professional life is that “a six-foot tall man drowns walking across a river that’s an average of three feet deep.” The...
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Conceiving issues that will gestate in the next nine months; planning for...
The fact that Publishers Launch Conferences will stage half-a-dozen or more events before our next big multi-day Digital Book World blowout next January doesn’t change the DBW calendar. Now is the time...
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The subscription model for ebooks hasn’t emerged yet, but it will
From the beginning of Digital Change Thinking Time, which for me goes back to the mid-1990s, “subscription” has been high on the list of future expectations. That’s natural. The subscription model has...
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Guessing wrong about the future happens to all of us; here are 2 times it...
One very lucky thing for those of us who are in the habit of predicting the future is that very few people keep score on us. We mostly keep score on ourselves. When I want to remind readers of...
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We’re getting SaaS-y, going Hollywood, and starting to plan Digital Book...
It is hard to believe that we’re starting to plan the fourth annual Digital Book World conference, which will be held January 16-17, 2013 at the Hilton in New York City. But we are. The first DBW was...
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Subscription models seem to me to be for ebook niches, not a general offer
Another fledgling ebook retailing venture came through our office this month touting a subscription proposition. I told the entrepeneur “I’m skeptical of the subscription model for ebooks,” and he...
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How much time and effort should established publishers be spending on startups?
We are now in a period replete with startups that want to be the disruption in publishing. We see a lot of them in our office. Part of our business involves helping startups find relevance and contacts...
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The truth is we do not yet know whether ebooks will work for anything except...
In the 1990s, Mark Bide would always begin the “Publishing in the 21st Century” conferences we ran by reviewing the research we had done around some aspect of digital change in publishing with the...
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Nine places to look in 2014 to predict the future of publishing
The digital transition of the trade book publishing business, which I would date from the opening of Amazon.com in 1995, enters its 20th year in 2014. Here are some of the ponderables as we close out...
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Subscription services for ebooks progress to becoming a real experiment
My long-held conviction that broad-based subscriptions for ebooks were not likely to work is partly based on facts that are now changing. It is still by no means a slam dunk that ebooks must go where...
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Not all books and not all subscription services are created equal
Digital change has forced many book publishers to rethink the mix of their lists. The most obvious aspect of that is the need for increased vertical-, topic- or audience-consciousness. In the days when...
View ArticleWhat Oyster going down demonstrates is not mostly about the viability of...
The news that the general ebook subscription offering Oyster is throwing in the towel was not really a surprise. The business model they were forced to adopt for the biggest publishers — paying full...
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