Yesterday, Eoin Purcell wrote a blog post called “The Opportunity Apple Just Created For Publishers” pointing out the obvious that we somehow haven’t picked up on. But I’m skeptical that publishers are in a place where they can take advantage of the opportunity to sell directly through their own apps.
Subscribe Me to Your Leader
Angry Robot—a British Sci-fi publisher—has recently made the headlines of some trade magazines by coming out with a subscription model for their e-books. Is the subscription model something that general trade publishing can act on?
Is Pottermore a Game Changer?
Book Summit: Chekov, E-Reading, and Transmedia
BookNet Canada was at the 10th Book Summit last Friday to witness a collective train of thought that included biodiversity, Chekov, video games, and fan fiction.
They're Always After Me Red Lemonade!
Richard Nash needs no introduction but if he does you can do no better than to tune into the talk he gave at the 2010 BookNet Technology Forum. Nash has been re-imagining the business of publishing for some time and, in fact, left his post at Soft Skull to begin building that re-imagining.
Red Lemonade, his new project, is all about connecting readers and writers and has that social community goodness baked right in. There are no walled gardens here.
Does this on its own reinvent publishing?
E-Book Advertising Is Here
There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about Harry Hurt III’s upcoming e-book. Hurt sought out many sponsors for his book, which sounds like it involved a lot of travel (i.e., is expensive for the author to write). The sponsors gave him money, equipment and products in exchange for ads inside the book and “significant product placement woven throughout [the book’s] narrative.”
Will readers mind the advertisements in the book? Is it possible to work product placement into your narrative seamlessly?
The Conflict of Interest: Agents as Publishers
Digital Publishing and Tina Fey's Rules of Improv
Is Self-Publishing the Book Equivalent of Demand Media?
Demand Media is what most would describe as a “content farm”: It’s the equivalent of factory-farmed chicken. The content is created and put out as cheaply and quickly as possible, but the welfare of those involved and the nutritional content is questionable. I don’t want advice from that kind of content source. And yet I have a hard time not getting these sorts of results in my web searches. Parallels can be drawn between what’s going on in publishing and Demand Media’s invasion of the web content world.
Our Futures in Publishing after the Digital Transition
Last week, James McQuivey, VP and Principal Analyst of Forrester Research, shared results and anecdotes from the Digital Book World/Forrester 2010 Publishing Executive Survey in a video (embedded below). The survey was about the attitudes and opinions of publishing executives regarding the digital shift in publishing. And although it revealed a great deal of enthusiasm for digital, there were some details about the transition that deserve a closer look.
