March 23rd, 2020
There’s a lot of coverage of the challenges facing book retail right now because of the coronavirus. The situation is shocking and sad. But it feels careless to forget that even if every bookstore in the world shut down for the next 12 months, people would still have over ten million different ebooks available for…
August 19th, 2019
Last week the U.S. Census Bureau reported that U.S. bookstore sales dropped 5.1% in the first six months of 2019. I filed the report away — as I always do with industry sales reports — with the thought “up a little here, down a little there….” While a 5% shift is, by most measures, more than…
May 15th, 2019
Everybody knows Kickstarter. Not everyone knows that Kickstarter is a major player in publishing, both for book-like objects and for journalism.
April 2nd, 2019
Updated March, 2024. In this third post of a three-part series (part 1 is here) (part 2 is here), I’ll focus directly on the book publishing industry and how the next recession could be felt. I hope that an analysis of the impact of past recessions might arm us for the next.
January 28th, 2019
In the first post of this 3-part series on the impact of recessions on publishing industries I took a broad look at the economic expansion since the recession of 2007, pondering when the next recession will pop. Part 1 Part 3 There’s a challenge in assessing the impact of economic events on the publishing and…