Just in time for those reports that Big Five publisher Simon & Shuster (S&S) is, like Hachette, in negotiations with Amazon, as covered here by Sarah Shaffi at The Bookseller.
As Greg Bensinger and Shira Ovide at the Wall Street Journal quoted Les Moonves, CEO of CBS, which owns S&S, “It’s going to be a very interesting thing to watch.”
That salient point — the one that reminds us that we don’t know what these talks are about — hasn’t deterred speculation, of course. Which already has launched worried tweets from people hearing one unconfirmed thing or another blogger’s conjecture.
Could we not just establish an industry genre called Gossip and be done with it?
Of course, that sound you hear now may be fresh batteries going into the bullhorns. As if your ears weren’t already ringing from the air-raid-siren pitch of recent rhetoric around the hashtagged and hashed-out #AmazonHachette talks, right?
When GigaOM news editor Laura Hazard Owen and I discovered we were writing about the same thing from two different angles over the weekend, we realised that it makes sense for us to gang up on you this week.
So I’m delighted to tell you that Owen will join me as a special co-host this Friday (18 July) for our weekly #FutureChat with The FutureBook community. We want you with us, whatever your stance on the issues.
And our topic? What’s the matter, are you deaf? Just kidding. But I mean really.
What’s with the tone of publishing’s debate this summer?
Join us Friday for a #FutureChat session, with my special guest co-host Laura Hazard Owen from GigaOM. We’ll be live on Twitter, at 4 p.m. London time, 11 a.m. New York time, 8 a.m. Los Angeles, 5 p.m. Berlin, 3 p.m. GMT.
By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
The FutureBook: #FutureChat recap: How can we pay authors what they deserve?
Read the full post at: The Bookseller’s The FutureBook
