October 28th, 2012
XML will be celebrating its official 15th anniversary on February 10, 2013. By many measures it has been a huge success. There are thousands of XML dialects used across a vast swath of the sciences, in business and in ecommerce. By the measure of the book publishing community it’s been less than a huge success.
October 18th, 2012
The big book publishing news this week is that Barnes & Noble’s boycott of Amazon publishing titles is proving effective and hitting authors and publishers where it hurts the most: hardcover sales of big new titles.
September 20th, 2012
When I began researching The Metadata Handbook I believed that metadata was magic. I believed that if you could add rich and accurate metadata to a title listing you’d all but guarantee big sales. I’ve since learned that while metadata is enchanting, its powers are far more down to earth.
September 3rd, 2012
The ongoing scandal of phony book reviews on Amazon now has a name, Sock Puppets. Perfect!
September 3rd, 2012
We’ve seen a lot of righteous indignation following David Streitfeld’s recent New York Times article on the occasional practice of paying for positive book reviews on Amazon. I read the story and moved on without giving it much thought: I assumed that everyone knew that the review system on Amazon was rigged.