June 27th, 2008
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,…
June 25th, 2008
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…
June 24th, 2008
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” — featuring the forgotten standalone eBook readers like the Rocket eBook and the SoftBook Reader. That revolution never took off, and wound down…
June 20th, 2008
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…
June 20th, 2008
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…