Future

OMG! What if B&N Closes?

“The report of my death was an exaggeration.” So said Mark Twain in 1897, and I’m wondering if Barnes & Noble might be saying the same thing right about now.   Over the last week, an article by Michael Levin has been making the rounds, causing fear and trembling among certain groups of authors and…
Read More
The Everything Store

Still Conflicted about Amazon

I’ve just finished reading Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. I’m still processing what I learned, and checking other sources for differing perspectives, but my initial reaction is that this is an eye-opening, clarifying, sobering yet illuminating resource for anyone interested in publishing or business in general.   I…
Read More

5 Reasons to Embrace the 21st Century

I’ve been thinking a lot about how things are changing so fast these days… technology is obsolete the moment it comes to market, there’s a new “must participate” social network every week, and publishing, well, after a good 100-year run, publishing is finally being forced to enter the 21st century. It all feels a little…
Read More
Future

What Does the Future Hold?

I was talking with a friend who works in the financial industry, and a question came up about what we would each be doing 30 years from now. My friend was anticipating a prosperous retirement at that point, having built up a significant and valuable business. While the financial life of our nation has its…
Read More
seth godin

Do Authors Have a Right to be Paid?

This controversial blog post by Matthew Ingram made quite a stir last week: Godin to authors: You have no right to make money any more After a quick look, I responded via Twitter: “For obvious reasons, this article kind of makes my blood boil.” It wasn’t until the weekend that I had some time to…
Read More

Should Publishing Be Compared to the Music Industry?

(Maybe Not) Continuing on the theme of how publishing is evolving, you probably know that many people are comparing our current situation to the music industry’s revolutionary changes over the last dozen years. If we’re smart, the wisdom goes, we’ll carefully study how things have gone in that medium and see what we can learn from it. I’ve read many, many articles…
Read More

Q4U: What Gives You Hope?

It’s no secret that things are changing so fast in the publishing industry – along with the entire culture – that it’s difficult to know where we’ll be in a year, let alone five or ten years from now. Some people are pessimistic about the future of publishing, but I don’t listen much to the…
Read More

A Culture of Free

Yesterday I speculated on one aspect of the future of books, the idea of how technology will (or won’t) affect the presentation of a book. Today my speculations are more about the market and the changing perceived value of a book. One thing that concerns me about our current Internet culture is that it’s conditioning…
Read More

For the Love of a Book

Last week Publishers Lunch featured a guide to the latest eReaders coming down the pike (here). It’s fascinating and makes me think of all kinds of possibilities for the future. The new readers will have terrific uses in business, for games, for keeping up on news, for editors and others in publishing, and many more.…
Read More