On the trade side, we often forget that the shift to digital is affecting academic publishing as well. Recently, there’s been a lot of debate over how to handle journal publication and access to research. The business model is changing there too, as was evident during Open Access week, a global event, now in its 4th year, which promotes Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. I attended one of its events in Guelph that had me yearning to work on campus with academics.
Are Hardcovers Outdated?
Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda is a runaway bestseller. I’ve seen it consistently rank as a top fiction title in bestseller lists for months. At first, I didn’t know much about the book, and like many I wondered how it managed to build up so much speed.
An article in The Globe and Mail on Monday tried to demystify this phenomenon.
Something for the Ladies
We in book publishing know that women make up a large majority of our market, but what do we do to cater to them? There are many ways for a publisher or bookseller to keep women in mind, but to cover them all today would be excessively long. You’re all busy people, I know. So I’ll focus specifically on packaging in this blog post.
Anthologize: Making Web-First Workflow Even Easier for Publishers
Anthologize grew out of One Week | One Tool—yes, one week—a project of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.
So, what’s all the fuss about? This is the extra step that’s been needed to make it extremely easy for any publisher to implement web-first workflow : all you need is WordPress and a plugin.
The Fight Over Formats: All or Nothing
Random House and the Jackal are going at it and I can’t blame them. They are fighting over some very valuable territory. We’ve all read lots about trying to claim backlist ebook rights, about the conflict of interest in becoming an agent-publisher, about single-channel exclusives being a bad idea, blah, blah, blah. This turf war has raised a bigger problem:
Does it make sense to separate ebook rights from print rights?
It doesn’t—at least not if you’re the one who only has print. Here’s why.
Give the Backlist a Chance
Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. This has me thinking about backlist. We spend a lot of time talking about the future and worrying about the frontlist, but what can set a publisher apart from the rest is a profitable backlist and arguably what can set a bookseller apart from the rest is thoughtful curating of backlist titles.
We the Supply Chain
The sixth annual AMR Supply Chain Top 25 report has just been released and it has me thinking about the role that BookNet Canada plays in the publishing industry trying to raise awareness of the supply chain discipline and how it impacts business.
Say Hello to the Copyright Modernization Act
New copyright legislation is always a big deal. Not only does it stand to impact most of our daily lives, whether we’re loading music to listen to on the bus or trying to read a new ebook , but it is also an industry game-changer. For book publishing, a “copyright industry” that’s also trying to bridge the gap between print and digital, the current Copyright Act (unchanged since 1997) is sometimes like the little brother on crutches who can’t keep up when all we want to do is run towards the ice-cream truck (play along with me and imagine that the ice-cream truck is the exciting world of digital distribution).
Confluence As a Web-Based Publishing System
In conferences and sessions we often discuss XML based publishing workflows…a concept I love, but I term I hate. Concept — content that is single sourced, marked up and is used to drive a plethora of end uses (i.e. pbook, ebook, web content, app, etc…). Why do I hate it? It is scary, maybe not to everyone, but to enough people in the “content business” that the term itself can often kill any hope of implementation.
Here’s why we need solutions that take the scary out of XML publishing workflows.
One Book, One Twitter: Voting Starts Monday!
“What if everyone on Twitter read the same book at the same time and we formed one massive, international book club?”—Jeff Howe in One Book, One Twitter … aka #1b1t
That’s the concept behind One Book, One Twitter (#1b1t ), and I think it’s pretty awesome.
One Book, One Twitter is the brainchild of Jeff Howe (@crowdsourcing ), and here’s how it works
