Amazon’s retail juggernaut has many people upset, but perhaps we should all reflect on the fact that a company devoted to customer service, thin margins, and a long-term disciplined strategy can thrive.
The misplaced anxiety and consternation publishers and authors showed in the face of Amazon’s Price Check app revealed an industry and culture rooted in the past. And that’s not where the readers of the future are coming from.
A new book edited by David Swords on patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) provides a good background on the topic, but there is a broader context of PDA, which is not fully addressed.
The question of when print will end is often framed as if it is a natural occurrence, an evolutionary question, or the likely outcome of a sporting event, rather than a business decision that publishers may revisit on a regular basis.
Publishers’ practice of clinging to DRM may be strengthening Amazon’s already overwhelming market position. Publishers should consider dropping DRM and even assisting in the creation of new digital venues.
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.
The clear benefits of the subscription model make it enticing even for those who supposedly abhor it. And while it’s right to try to make it as efficient as possible, it will likely be with us for a long time to come.
A review of the novel “A Novel Bookstore” by Laurence Cossé, which imagines an ideal bookstore and the policies required, including peer review, to make such a venture possible.
Siri may be many things — cool feature, Google killer, source of amusement — but it is perhaps the ultimate expression of the semantic Web. And it’s still in beta.
The decline of bookstores has made discovery increasingly difficult. One solution is to create a new kind of bookstore, which is effectively a showroom and community center for the celebration of the book.
The commodity nature of the OA service seems to predict certain structural aspects, including lower prices and bigger journals.
The governance of not-for-profit publishing entities plays a large role in those entities’ success or failure.
Once again, Mary Meeker has presented her Internet trends, and once again, they are fascinating. Subtitled, “We Aren’t in Kansas Anymore . . .,” the data Meeker presents paints a picture of an online world — literally. More users come […]
The orphan works problem is finite. Current practices will chip away at the number of orphans. It is unlikely that more orphans will be created in the future because it is so easy for publishers now to hold onto rights and keep books available in some form.
By offering a bare-bones Kindle at a very low price point, Amazon has created a virtually disposable e-reader that does exactly what it should, and little more. Will this little probe down-market unleash a tidal surge toward e-books?