by Porter Anderson

Why We Don’t Read More? Are Books Still Our Best Bet?

What If Books Just Aren’t It Anymore? Why don’t we start with the assumption that social media and the web are taking over because people actually enjoy them and go from there? Baldur Bjarnason Baldur Bjarnason does seem to actually enjoy getting het up about things. And he’s good at it, too. People generally like… Read More

by Porter Anderson

Digital Book World’s Choir: Keynotes From Amazon, Apple, And All

The First Major Publishing Pilgrimage Of 2015 Publishing conferences are ritual performances. They are to the varied segments of publishing what morality plays are to the various forms of Christianity. They are narratives that are organised to demonstrate, emphasise, and reinforce the orthodoxy. Those are the words of one of our most dependable iconoclasts, Baldur… Read More

by Porter Anderson

This Week: Will Publishing Change The Tone?

It’s Never Too Late To Embrace Your Cognitive Dissonance Here’s an interesting irony for those following — or being battered to bits by — the Amazon-Hachette mania that’s enraging so many people in book publishing in this loud, hot summer. Edan Lepucki, author of California, the Stephen Colbert-promoted Hachette book, is married to Patrick Brown — the main spokesperson for… Read More

by Porter Anderson

#FutureChat: How can we pay authors what they deserve?

Each Friday, join us for a #FutureChat session, 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.  As Philip Jones writes in his leader piece, Author yearnings, in The Bookseller today, “That authors are paid too little and that their situation has worsened is indisputable.” Note… Read More

by Porter Anderson

Buggy Whipped Into Collaboration

BERLIN — “The market for reading may be expanding significantly,” Brian O’Leary told the plenary session at Klopotek’s Publishers’ Forum, “but the gains are seen almost entirely outside the prevailing supply chain. Fixed on the creation, management and sale of physical and digital objects, publishers view forms of writing and reading as potential threats to… Read More

by Porter Anderson

Publishing, Between Revolution and Revolt

Follow that burn­ing fuse. It runs between these two curi­ously dif­fer­ent words. We may need to think about which of them is closer to us. Rev­o­lu­tion. Pretty com­fort­able. Thanks to Madi­son Avenue, we nowa­days say “rev­o­lu­tion” for every change, from geopo­lit­i­cal alliances to bath­room tis­sue. Revolt. Not so com­fort­able. More acute. Some­thing or some­one feels out of con­trol. It’s an upris­ing, not a down­falling. Dangerous. Read More