As painful as pricing issues may be in the marketplace and in authors’ efforts to put together a living, the real question is what happens in the public mind when pricing goes through the floor? Read More
IDPF at BEA: Tension Around the Proposed W3C Merger
Going…going… At what may well have been the last International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) conference, a proposed merger of IDPF and the World Wide Web Consortium cast a chill in Chicago. Read More
At Chicago’s BEA-Lite: A Meaningful Discussion on Publishers and Authors
On the show floor, the crowds and booths are down. In one unusually frank exchange, however, this BEA finds traction on issues of publishers and writers. Read More
#IDPFDigiCon Preview: A Few Words With Michael Healy
Content today is ‘born digital, transmitted digitally, used digitally, consumed digitally,’ and a leading player in the field plans his address at IDPF’s conference at BEA to highlight some of the hotspots in a world teeming with copyright issues. Read More
Chicago’s BEA BookCon Adds Memoirist-Comedian Tig Notaro
Not only BookExpo America but also its consumer-facing BookCon will be in Chicago in May, trading New York’s Javits Center for the McCormick Place complex. Read More
China’s Feng Tang: Translating the ‘Beijing, Beijing’ Of His Peers
‘Sexuality Is Almost My Trademark’ “Why didn’t you take your stupid Three Gun briefs home?” she asked. “They were clearly dry already, dry as they would ever get, but you didn’t take them back. Why? After looking at them all day, I would go out and dance all night.” What the author Feng Tang does… Read More
‘Putting Readers First’ At BEA: Gatekeepers, Curators, And ‘Too Many Books’
‘Readers Are The Power Brokers Who Matter Most’ Readers decide. Readers come first, as they are the primary filters. Imprints, choices, and selections should really mean something. Brand can’t be faked in this area. Publish fewer books; publish better books. The concept has begun gaining traction as it dawns on many of us that “discoverability”… Read More
‘The Overselling Of Self-Publishing': New Perspective
‘A Serious Epidemic Of Impatience’ Here in New York City where BookExpo America (BEA) is holding the focus of many in the traditional publishing establishment, a friend and I were finishing lunch at Café Luxembourg when the waiter approached. “I overheard you guys talking about publishing,” he said. “I wondered if you could give me any advice about… Read More
Global dreams, local challenges: BEA amid transition
Amazon’s shadow, BookCon’s boost, IDPF’s confab, Chinese Trajectory, scalding-hot Scalzi: Must be BEA Just in time to chill the rising heat of late-May New York: news of troubled talks in the UK between the biggest bookseller and the biggest book publisher on Earth. As my colleague Philip Jones writes at The Bookseller, “Penguin Random House UK and Amazon… Read More
What if the 90 percent does write a book?
‘Your followers are so cynical’ In digital publishing, we’ve been talking about that “tsunami of content” (thank you, Jon Fine) for a long time. This week here at BookExpo America (BEA), however, we had a good remi nder that the world at large may not yet understand the stupendously deepening inventory that has come right along with… Read More