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…
June 15th, 2008
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…
June 15th, 2008
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…