Lending E-Books Gets Going

The digital revolution in publishing doesn’t play favorites. When it comes to e-books, change has come for author, publishers and libraries alike. Once upon a time, libraries were about access to books – period – and in that line of work, they held a monopoly....

Examining New Business Models

Until very recently, the core business model of publishing was in a steady state. Indeed, it was so for a couple of hundred years – Publishers acquired copyrights, sometime risking cash to do so by paying in advance; they printed books; and they sold them. Yet in...

BookCon Comes To BookExpo

As bookstores face up to the challenge of digital distribution, book publishers are conceding that so-called sales to “the trade” are giving way to a straight-to-consumer pitch. For booksellers, a response is to use digital to their advantage. At BookExpo America, the...

Publishing’s New World

In scholarly publishing, adoption of an Open Access business model entirely redraws the map. All at once, customer service for authors swells from a tiny island to continental proportions. Rivers of subscription revenue may run dry, but they are replaced with...

Print Fights On, Lives Another Day

The Digital Book World Conference marked its fifth anniversary this week. With the selection of Jeff Bezos biographer Brad Stone as a featured speaker, show organizer Mike Shatzkin made plain the central role of Amazon in today’s book world – digital or otherwise....

Barnes & Noble Has New CEO

The door has opened on a new year – and for Barnes & Noble, the understandable preference is not to look back but to look ahead. In a week that saw B&N’s one-time flagship store shuttered in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, there was much news from the retail...

The New Editors

What is an editor? That question, posed at a roundtable discussion at the recent PubWest Conference in Santa Fe, elicited surprising new answers. In the digital age of publishing, the job description for “editor” is shifting, morphing, and growing larger, agreed...