The Scholarly Kitchen
Barnes & Noble
What Scholarly Publishers Can Learn from Bookish
Bookish is a new online bookstore and discovery service. It is a joint venture of three publishers and presents a useful model for what scholarly publishers could do in building their own online bookstore.
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A New Publishing Ecosystem Emerges
A new publishing ecosystem is emerging that includes among its participants O’Reilly Media, Pearson, Safari Books, Barnes & Noble, Microsoft, and Liberty Media. This new ecosystem may come to challenge the proprietary ebook networks of Amazon and Apple. Continue reading
The Outside Context Effect and Book Publishing Dominance
Is the Internet simply an irresistible “outside context” event for traditional book publishers? Two interesting articles make it clear that it may be, if wielded aggressively. The “outside context problem” was described in Iain M. Bank’s book “Excession,” in which a perfect black orb (the Excession) appears suddenly. It is judged to be older than … Continue reading
Predicting the Present
The text of a presentation delivered at the recent NFAIS national conference, covering various scenarios for the future of publishing. The argument is that these future scenarios are already evident in the world of the present day, though in embryonic form, and that by studying the “embryos,” we can make reasonable predictions as to where things are headed. Continue reading
The Bookstore in the Library
PDA programs set up a kind of bookstore within library OPACs. It is possible to expand the range of these programs to enable the purchase of books by individuals on their own account–a new service for patrons and an income stream for libraries and publishers alike. Continue reading
A Newfangled Online Bookstore
There are compelling reasons to create an online bookstore specializing in academic titles. Such a bookstore could be linked to physical community spaces and may even have a life as a component of library catalogs. Continue reading
How Barnes & Noble Can Take a Bite Out of Amazon
Barnes & Noble can compete more effectively with Amazon by moving to a strategy of making its infrastructure available to numerous companies, many of which formerly saw B&N as a rival. Continue reading
What We Should Learn from the Collapse of Borders
The collapse of Borders should be a wake-up call to publishers that assume that the core infrastructure of their legacy businesses will always be there to provide essential services. Continue reading
The Google Books Settlement: Where Things Stand, and Some Suggestions for What’s Next
The Google Books Settlement actually hit its second roadblock this week. Here’s why, and where matter might go from here. Continue reading
It’s the End of the Book As We Know It — and I Feel Fine
As bookstores and books in general meet the fate of physical media everywhere, maybe we should celebrate. Continue reading
Authors
The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is "[t]o advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking." SSP established The Scholarly Kitchen blog in February 2008 to keep SSP members and interested parties aware of new developments in publishing.
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The Scholarly Kitchen is a moderated and independent blog. Opinions on The Scholarly Kitchen are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those held by the Society for Scholarly Publishing nor by their respective employers.
