Are free ebooks a good idea or not?
Kindle is certainly engendering a lot of confusion by billboarding the downloads of free ebooks as “sales.” That paradoxical scorekeeping was the lead for an article by Motoko Rich in The New York...
View ArticleDad could really help publishers with analysis they need to do
I was extremely fortunate in my “choice” of parents. I had both admiration and affection for them, and I always had a great time just shooting the bull with my dad, Leonard Shatzkin. He was a real...
View ArticleWhat I Would Have Said in London, Part 1
I have gotten some requests, in comments and off-the-blog, to write what I was going to say to the AGM of the PA in an appearance I was supposed to make there on Wednesday, April 28. I felt terrible...
View ArticleA Mother’s Day Tribute to My Mom: Elky Shatzkin
I’ve written several times about my father’s life in the book business, which shaped quite a few careers, including mine. Here’s one. Andanother. This post, for Mother’s Day weekend, is about my...
View ArticleLosing the secondary business can kill you
Before the Internet deconstructed the publishing value chain and enabled new models, both publishers and booksellers benefited from a lot of what I’d call “secondary business”. Secondary business was...
View ArticleOil in the bookstore ecosystem marshlands; danger ahead
I am finding an eerie similarity between the disastrous Gulf oil spill and the parlous state of America’s bookstores. In both cases, the forces are in place for a disaster that will play out over the...
View ArticleWhite labeled specialty stores, not ebook superstores, are the future
One of the recurring characteristics of “change” is that the first iteration of something new looks a lot like what it is replacing. So it has been with ebooks and ebook retailing. The ebooks...
View ArticleTechnology, curation, and why the era of big bookstores is coming to an end
I stumbled across a Sarah Weinman post from a few months ago that posits the notion that the chain bookstore (by which it would appear she means the superstores of the past 20 years, not the chain...
View ArticleDeep in the weeds of publishing economics
This is a geeky post about publishing economics. Some people like that. If you don’t, you were warned before you invested any time. Two otherwise unrelated projects last week — a book I’m working on...
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