A Kaiser Foundation study finds that kids are consuming electronic media more than ever. But there are suprises in the data and potentially important caveats for scholarly publishers with an eye to the future.
Is Amazon giving up on the Kindle? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s certainly being pressured in an area of publishing that has heated up quickly and almost counter-intuitively.
Highlights from this week’s reader comments, pointing the way to dialog you might have otherwise missed. Also, let me know if you like this as a weekly feature.
Kirkus Reviews is doomed. But for all the losses of old ways of discovering books, new ones keep cropping up. The future is bright for book publishing.
Is the Kindle really a success? Do the vague and convoluted statements from Amazon about Kindle sales mean anything? The backlash against Amazon’s lack of transparency has apparently begun.
The shift to the Systems Age is happening so fast and completely that publishers are left with only one option — fight fire with fire. Will they? Can they? Some examples show the way.
As 2009 comes to an end, here is a selection of entries that left an especially nice flavor on the palette.
Two fiction publishers decide to delay release of their e-books, further marginalizing their books. Meanwhile, an STM book publisher gets it right.
The new Nook is over-packaged, and has design and technical issues that keep it from competing well with the Kindle. Too bad.
The WSJ stance against Google reveals the power of the real-time Web and value-inertia among the ad sales people at WSJ, not predation by Google.
“Sports Illustrated” is showing off a new reading tablet for TIME properties. Is it also a preview of an Apple tablet?
A new initiative for a unifying online catalog of resources is underway. Can it provide a substrate for future innovation?
‘Twas the month before Christmas, and by listening hard, you can hear Joe Esposito yearn for a library card. The reasons are simple, yet give publishers pause. No wonder Joe’s only hope is with Santa Claus.
Professional and scholarly titles dominate the ebook market, and are destined to grow further. So why is the media looking the other way?
E-books are changing the world of publishing, but rather than creating something new, too much emphasis is being put on re-hashing failures of the past. The changing market doesn’t have to be a zero sum game, and the rise of new forms may not spell the death of the book as we know it.