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
Publishing innovation: #FutureChat recap
Pushback and pull forward…If there had been any doubt about the scepticism encountered around digital cookbooks, you could find some verification in The FutureBook.net community’s #FutureChat on publishing innovation. Alta Editions’ Chris McBride, in our walkup to the #FutureChat, had spoken of how the cookbook sector has seemed to lag some other parts of the books industry… Read More
#FutureChat: How can we ease the summer's debate?
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… Read More
When Retailers & Publishers Collide: Who Gets Hurt?
Has anybody told the readers about this? You know, the customers? What if they were brand-savvy enough to know what they’re missing when a contract dispute stalls out the shipping of their favorite author? What if we tell them? If readers were aware of who published what and, in the current example, became incensed that… Read More
How Much ‘Discussion’ Are Publishers Ready to Have?
For all the mistrust that some in the creative corps today harbor for traditional publishers, Reidy is absolutely right that those publishers need to engage—and not just to remind us of what great work they can do but to tell us some of the challenges and hurdles they face. Read More