Before Amazon, there was the Online BookStore (OBS), now Open Book Systems (OBS). We maintained a list of all the publishers who had online presences; it took up about half a computer screen in 1994. Before starting the Online BookStore, our company packaged books for publishers, one of which was John Quarterman’s The Matrix (Digital Press, →
The big news to come out of BookExpo America (BEA) in Chicago this month is the early sounds of a merger of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), managers of the publishing industry’s EPUB standard, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) and CEO →
How does a reader know that the text in hand or on screen contains true information? Back when I started my publishing career at Little, Brown/Trade Editorial in 1976, many independent publishing houses dotted the landscape of a diverse industry. Readers could trust brands – we knew, for example, that Knopf cookbooks were top of →
On December 21, book traditionalists celebrated an apparent increase in this year’s sales of printed books. But the 2% rise in sales reported by Nielsen BookScan – which constitutes a major success in the foundering book industry – unfortunately has more to do with adult coloring books and ebook price negotiations than it does with →
Since the dawn of the Kindle and the consequent boom in ebook sales, it has appeared that the days of traditional print books are numbered. As technology evolves and the e-reader market expands to include more devices – perhaps most notably, the iPad – more and more consumers seem to be making the switch from →
Social media platform Milq, created by Don MacKinnon, Jordan Jacobs, and Tomi Poutanen, was founded upon the belief that today’s feed-based social media is stifling the generation and discovery of online content. With an all-star list of investors ranging from Viacom CEO Tom Freston to Bacardi CEO Michael Dolan, and from Google to Goldman Sachs →