April 28th, 2021
Three different items “crossed my desk” this week that made me think more about the role of technology in the future of book publishing. They’re from different sources, but the messages converge. The first item was a March blog post by Benedict Evans. (His excellent free weekly newsletter is a ‘must-subscribe’; the paid version is…
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. There’s a challenge in assessing the impact of economic events on the publishing and entertainment industries over the…
January 9th, 2018
Over the holidays I received an inquiry from a journalist about book buying, was it more of an impulse or a plan. What’s the breakdown? Seemed like a simple enough question. From my studies on book buying I knew that the impulse percentage was fairly high, higher than many would expect. We want to think…
December 22nd, 2016
I’ve become intrigued with the intersection of book publishing and machine learning, text mining, natural language processing and the like: technologies that get lumped under the rubric of artificial intelligence. Cliff Guren, who runs the publishing consultancy Syntopical, is emerging as one of the book publishing industry’s top specialists in this area. I thought it…
January 10th, 2012
…or so said the article announcing Walrus TV.