“Baffling.” That’s the take from the CEO of the American Booksellers Association. “A big win” says Amazon, speaking not for the e-tailer but – it says – for Kindle owners. “An intrusion into the business sector by the federal government in a manner that is designed to bully people,” declares top agent Trident Media Group [...]
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BTB #290: Top Agent Calls Amazon ‘Innovative’
Publishing. It’s a business of words. Yet, definitions of many common words in publishing’s vocabulary are evolving and mutating. What we mean by authors, agents, and even publishers is no longer clear. The man who discovered Tom Clancy in the early 1980s, and subsequently became one of the youngest agents ever to head the William [...]
PW’s Week Ahead 04.06.12
Surveys and polls are in the news – not on the presidential campaign, but on the rise of e-books in the US and the rest of the world. The French and the Japanese have something in common, it turns out, while in Brazil and India – two of the so-called BRICS group of developing nations [...]
BTB #289: Communities Of Content
As the online media marketplace evolves, publishers recognize they must redefine their businesses. The path Cincinnati-based F+W Media has chosen leads directly to the consumer via communities of shared interest, from writing, screenwriting, and fine art to genealogy, craft, woodworking, and design. By opening communications channels to its audiences, F+W curates editorial output and facilitates [...]
PW’s Week Ahead 03.30.12
Magic wand and e-reader in hand, Harry Potter returned to the spotlight on the publishing industry stage this week. Pottermore, the official digital home of the seven-novel series from J.K. Rowling launched this week. In the days ahead, when talk turns to evil-doing, it’s likely to involve old “you-know-what” – that’s right, DRM. “You know [...]
BTB #288: From Pulp to Pixels
It sounds like a roster of bands playing at the local music club this weekend: Park Avenue Tramp. Killing Cousins. Lovely Executioner. But instead, those are titles from a new e-book publishing house that aims to give a second literary life to pulp fiction authors and their works. On March 1, F+W Media announced creation [...]
PW’s Week Ahead 03.23.12
There will always be books, if only because Hollywood would die without them as sources for scripts. As The Hunger Games takes aim this weekend at movie audiences, agents and producers who are doing lunch in Lalaland should know that paranormal romances and dystopic futures are so yesterday. Meanwhile, Toni Morrison fans have something to [...]
BTB #287: In Europe, iPad May Mean iPay
Across Europe, magazine publishers have greeted the arrival of the Apple iPad with cheers. As media consumption of such tablets and other handheld devices grows in popularity, publishers see an opportunity to establish new business models for digital news and entertainment. Subscriptions and app purchases are among the ways magazines hope to engage readers and [...]
BTB #286: Howkins Keynotes OnCopyright 2012
“New ideas, not money or machinery, are the source of success today,” notes author and business consultant John Howkins. In the book, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas, and his subsequent work, Howkins has called attention to the economic value of “creative people, creative industries and creative cities” in an era when [...]
BTB #285: News from Digital Book World
Like the clans gathering for the St. Patrick’s Day parade, the houses came together in New York on March 13 for the annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers. The audience at the McGraw-Hill auditorium on Sixth Avenue heard the book business’s near-term future likened to the music industry’s recent past, and they were [...]
