by Porter Anderson

Kobo's Feast of Burden

Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn broke through the usual code of corporate silence. When things go wrong in large business settings in our digital age, the common mode of response is dictated by Legal. And Legal loves to gag a workforce. No one from the company in question is to speak. No one is to talk. Not even to say things that could help the wider world understand the corporation’s difficult decisions.

What Tamblyn gave us was not only a glimpse of what his company was facing while many of us freely bad-mouthed it for the nine days of the October ordeal, but also a deeply disturbing, problematic issue we all must now take to heart very carefully. Read More

by Porter Anderson

Self-Publishing’s Parallel Disruptions

It comes as news to no one in the indus­try! the indus­try! that self-publishing is con­tro­ver­sial. We may tend, how­ever, to think of it as con­tro­ver­sial for that indus­try, while not look­ing at what it can mean for writ­ers and writ­ing. It is, in fact, a devel­op­ment full of argu­ment not only for pub­lish­ers but also for literature. Read More

by Porter Anderson

Charleston’s PubSmart Joins Conference Row

Pub­S­mart may be cre­at­ing some­thing we’ve needed to see much more of: a con­fer­ence in which not only business-conscious authors but also smaller pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies can start doing the log­i­cal net­work­ing they’ve needed: with each other. Read More

by Porter Anderson

The Haunting of NaNoWriMo

Put that copy of Eleanor Cat­ton back down. True, I’d be hon­ored to be crushed by a Man Booker Prize–win­ner. But heav­ing The Lumi­nar­ies at me is unfair. It’s an 848-page New Zealand boul­der. I deserve a fight­ing chance. Pelt me with Kin­dle Sin­gles instead. Read More

by Porter Anderson

Books in Browsers: Toward ‘More Webby’ Books

The conference’s name can trip up newcomers who might take it too literally. “Books in Browsers” is the launchpad for formats that eventually may be tied to no one device, design, or delimiting factor we worry about today. Read More

by Porter Anderson

At Frankfurt Book Fair: Reaching for the "New Book"

If digital has taught us anything yet, it’s that its energies can blindside and reshape our work in publishing much more quickly than we expect at times, and in ways we inevitably wish we’d put more thought into earlier. Read More

by Porter Anderson

At Frankfurt: Sprint Beyond the Book

Even with Intel’s strong technical support and sponsorship–and with the caliber of the specialists gathered around the project’s table in Frankfurt–getting something that can be called a book in 72 hours is no mean feat. Read More

by Porter Anderson

At Frankfurt Book Fair: Turning Corners on Self-Publishing and Amazon?

Here at the 2013 Frankfurt Book Fair this week, if we’re not actually walking past a couple of smoothly contoured bends, we may at least be able to peer around them.

(1) Self-publishing. We may be seeing a widespread, collective nod of recognition going on; not a big “eureka!” moment, but a frank acknowledgment that the energies of the entrepreneurial-author community no longer can be dismissed as a faddish bubble of activity nor as negligible in their effect. Bowker has stepped in to add some new edge to this concept.

(2) Amazon. Not only is there less time and energy wasted on bad-mouthing Seattle here in Frankfurt than in many such earlier gatherings, but one rant against the retailer has been met with stark derision in the publishing community, and, in a more signal moment, a major leader in the business has waved the closest thing we’ve seen yet to an olive branch. Read More

by Porter Anderson

Oil, Water, Publishers, Self-Publishers

While many legacy publishers may not like to think about how large the self-publishing movement is (Smashwords alone, has announced that writers have self-published more than 250,000 books on its platform), it appears that making money off self-publishing authors is just fine by the traditional houses. And that is, at the least, an unattractive reality. Read More