The other day I signed a third-party agreement to back up to the cloud our document repository. Functionality: kind of ho-hum, routine, and back-end. Cost: about $200 per year. However, the agreement took weeks to negotiate and ended up being over 30 pages of gobbledygook legalese, replete with WHEREASes and disclaimers and tangled prose. By →
May Day! It’s May Day! We have three options to celebrate this day: a joyful, youthful celebration and dance; a protest of the masses against the elite; or a desperate cry for help. This pandemic year, it looks like all three types of May Day celebration were in order for the publishing industry. Remember the →
Faced with Amazonian Losses, Indie Publisher Sells Books out of Car Trunk An independent small publisher called recently, seeking to maintain control of, and expand market reach for his successful books on organic farming. His leading title, in its 9th edition, has sold over 18,000 copies. He wants to control business model, pricing, content, and →
Now that every client has become a server, every reader a potential publisher, and everyday people like tuna fishermen have become reality TV stars, it’s reassuring to see some privacy pushback. Not everyone wants to be a superstar 24X7. Recently, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler convinced the Hawaiian legislature to pass a law protecting celebrities from paparazzi in Hawaii: →
Last week we attended the MLA annual convention in Boston and ran into some industry friends from the “old” days of e-publishing, primarily from the university press community. Most reported a steady erosion of paper sales at their various institutions, particularly among the niche of scholarly monographs, which used to be a steady mainstay and reliable source →
I caught a glimpse of the new “book futures” market on Day – 1 of the London Book Fair last Sunday. The pre-show Digital Conference was my “jet lag day,” that first day after an all-night Boston-to-London flight. Warm room, low lighting, comfortable chairs, it was tempting sometimes to try and listen to the presenters →
Yesterday Mubarak’s government turned the Internet back on for Egypt; we are thankful that Egyptian voices can once more be heard around the world in real time as their political confrontations continue. Censorship is not new in the country; it is especially distressing to see the Internet used as a political football now that we →
I heard a thought-provoking webcast today, offered by the Book Industry Study Group entitled “Digital Books: A New Chapter for Reader Privacy” and presented by an ACLU representative. She spoke of case law that has been passed protecting our reader’s right to privacy, whether that means prohibiting Google Books from recording our thoughtpaths, and subsequently aggregating, archiving, →
Words inscribed on paper form a permanent record of our civilization. Just as a painter controls every brush stroke, a sculptor his chisel, so do authors deliberately choose each word, each signpost pointing to an idea or a thing. A book. A stunning achievement. Sometimes a genius captures in words the Geist of an era. As James →
Someone asked recently in a Book Industry Study Group (BISG) post: “Does anyone else out there, besides me, think that self-publishing should just go away and let ‘real’ publishing take over again?” Interesting question. But I don’t think that the clock will stop while we deliberate, folks. There is no turning back and we are →