In February of this year the O’Reilly fiefdom held its second “Tools of Change for Publishers” conference in New York City. Though the title of the conference suggests that it was not limited to book publishers, books were indeed the focus. Details from the conference have been slow to emerge in cogent form.
Steve Paxhia, my [...]
According to a press
release on Amazon.com’s Web site today, the online seller announced the
acquisition of Fabric.com, a leading online fabric store that offers custom
measured and cut fabrics, as well as patterns, sewing tools and accessories.
This acquisition will enable “Fabric.com to further
expand its selection of fabrics and accessories while enabling Amazon.com to
offer its customers a wider [...]
If you’ve read the section
on this site about eBooks and (what I call) eContent, you’ll know that I’m not
a big cheerleader for eBooks. I lived through the first eBook “revolution”Â
featuring the forgotten standalone eBook readers like the Rocket eBook and the
SoftBook Reader. That revolution never took off, and wound down more-or-less at
the same time as [...]
It’s not as if the last few months have been exactly
perky and upbeat around publishing offices across the U.S. But the last week seems
to have been completely inundated with a dismal torrent of bad news. Both Hearst
(3rd largest magazine publishing in the U.S.) and Hachette (dropped
out of the #10 spot in 2006, but presumably still [...]
In today’s edition of PrintAction’s weekly newsletter, I
found the headline: FEDEX KILLS KINKO’S BRAND. I had read this elsewhere, but
had not previously encountered the embittered remarks of the company founder, Paul
Orfalea.
I could paraphrase the accompanying article, but as I’m a
contributing writer to the publication, I hope that editor Jon Robinson will
not object to my quoting [...]
The title of this blog entry is also the title of a piece
in today’s New York Times. The story
is most simply stated by quoting from part of the second paragraph: “three of
the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down
on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online
activity.â€Â
Time Warner Cable, [...]
I am still reeling from Steve Ballmer’s atrociously
ill-considered remarks
to The Washington Post (Ballmer, as most recall, is CEO of Microsoft,
when Bill G. is not at home) that “there will be no media consumption left in
10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers,
no magazines that are delivered in paper [...]
As I watched the news reports on Tuesday evening indicating
that Barack Obama had captured the Democratic nomination for president, I
quipped to myself, “Time for a new blog entry called ‘Barack Obama and the
Future of Publishing’.†But, I thought, I didn’t recall publishing as a theme
of his campaign — I couldn’t recall Obama mentioning the “p†[...]
Every four years in Dusseldorf, Germany an enormous printing
trade show, called drupa (standing for Druck Und Papier [in German: printing and
paper] gets underway. According to the official
press release, “With 1,971 exhibitors from 52 countries spread across an
exhibition area of over 175,000 square metres and an anticipated 400,000
visitors from around the globe, the world’s No. 1 [...]
More credit where credit is due: I was alerted to this provocative
May 2008 column on Slate.com by
Bob Sacks in his Heard on the Web –
Media Intelligence newsletter.
Back in the prehistoric era, i.e. 1993, mega-bestselling
author Michael Crichton wrote an article for Wired magazine called Mediasaurus.
In the article he made several predictions, expanding from the premise stated
in [...]
