Publishing

Seth Godin’s memorable presentation at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in February 2008: *10 Bestsellers: Using New Media, New Marketing, and New Thinking to Create 10 Bestselling Books.* (link)

Tags: bookselling · ebooks · Seth Godin · video

Mar. 4, 2011

Neil Gaiman: Web piracy is good publicity

Neil Gaiman on the benefit to authors of having their work pirated on the web. It turns out, it’s good publicity.

Tags: copyright · Neil Gaiman

Feb. 21, 2011

Copyright Run Amok

A futile effort to secure reprint rights for an epigram from H.G. Wells has me steaming about the excesses of copyright law.

Tags: copyright · Defending Jacob · featured posts · H.G. Wells · Lawrence Lessig

Feb. 9, 2011

Great Moments in Publishing

Book cover: “The Girls in Publishing”

Tags: book covers

Aug. 22, 2010

Why the novel will survive the disappearance of the book

“Books, magazines and newspapers are next,” predicts Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the M.I.T. Media Lab. “Text is not going away, nor is reading. Paper is going away.”

Tags: ebooks · technology

Apr. 28, 2010

Not-So-Random House

What is that little house in Random House’s logo?

Tags: Candide · logo · Random House · Rockwell Kent · Voltaire

Feb. 27, 2010

How to design a book advertisement

An advertising copywriter has a thought about how to improve ads for books.

Tags: advertising · bookselling

Feb. 11, 2010

The Perils of Advertising

Rummaging through my computer recently, I came across this ad (PDF) for The Strangler. It ran in the New York Times and the Boston Globe on February 6, 2007, and in the weekly Boston Phoenix at the same time. There was a radio spot airing that week, as well, which was very fun to hear [...]

Tags: advertising · bookselling · The Strangler

Dec. 20, 2009

The View from Below: A midlist author watches the ebook wars

The publishing industry is a futures market – a Silicon Valley for books, with every publisher a venture capitalist searching for the Next Big Thing.

Tags: Amazon · ebooks · featured posts

Dec. 16, 2009

Publishing Agonistes

The major publishers are in a difficult position: they are service companies that function like manufacturing companies — 20th century businesses in a 21st century economy. The control of the book business is gradually slipping out of their hands. — William Petrocelli, “No One Warned the Dinosaurs. Will Anyone Warn the Publishers?”

Tags: ebooks

Dec. 1, 2009

Lukewarm Kindling

Anthony Grafton on the Kindle, which he loves but describes as “reading free of visual delight”: Open an old-fashioned book — a book published by Zone this year, or, even better, by Alfred A. Knopf thirty or forty years ago, or, better still, one printed by Aldo Manuzio a few hundred years before that — and you [...]

Tags: Anthony Grafton · ebooks · Kindle · technology

Oct. 30, 2009

“Immersive text-only experiences”

Over the course of the [Frankfurt Book] Fair various players offered phrases such as “a digital manifestation of what was a book” and “long-form narrative delivered digitally” and “story-telling” and “immersive text-only experiences,” and it is clear that the reason for such a profusion of vague terms is not obtuseness but a recognition that we’re [...]

Tags: ebooks

Oct. 28, 2009

Philip Roth on the novel’s “cultic” future

More clips from this interview here.

Tags: ebooks · interviews · Philip Roth · video