Kobo joins Kindle, Sony, iPad, and Nook Borders, the nation’s second largest bookstore chain today jumped into the fight for the e-reading public with a new e-reader from a Canadian company Kobo, Inc (used to be Shortcovers). Borders owns a significant portion of Kobo, Inc. The big advantage over Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony E-reader, Barnes Read more…
I’ve been researching do-it-yourself video for a presentation I’m giving later this month at the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Publishing University. This is hardly an example of what most indie publishers will attain, but it is an example of what you can do with clever people, a home studio, a somewhat hefty budget, and two minutes and ten Read more…
The weeding out of the e-reader/mobile device field has started (continued?) with Microsoft announcing it is canceling further development on its book-shaped, two-page device codenamed Courier. HP’s Slate is rumored to be on the chopping block too. Perhaps something to do with HP bailing out Palm last week. According to this rumor, HP didn’t like Read more…
As I read the April 19th edition of Publishers Weekly, which has a number of articles touching on e-books, I’m reminded of the 1970s when Gottschalk’s, a Fresno-based department store chain, was offering free lessons to housewives on how to use a new-fangled device called a microwave. I’m also reminded of when Beta was battling Read more…
[Under the “everybody needs an editor” category, the following paragraph was left off this post. Ooops.] There is a huge industry built upon the dreams of would-be published authors and startup publishers. Look around a little and you’ll find any number of dubious opportunities. For instance…. For $305 ForeWord magazine will write a review of Read more…
The quote below—which I’d never heard until Bill Secrest, Jr., a QDB author and friend, sent it to me—is worth its own blog: “Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The Read more…
One of the reasons to attend conferences is to confirm that your current beliefs and practices are valid. If you are anything like me, you, on occasion, make business decisions and take actions based on gut feelings or past experiences—feelings and experiences that are, as Nixon’s press secretary Ron Zeigler might have put it, inoperative. Read more…
Here, in random order, are a few quotes worth contemplating —often paraphrased—from various speakers at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. My apologies to the speakers for not attributing these, all were brilliant and many said basically the same things in different and enlightening ways. • Mobile publishing does not equal digital publishing. Read more…
The O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, held this year at New York’s Marriott Marquis Times Square, is the place to try and keep up with the technological advances currently flooding the book publishing industry. I attended three workshops yesterday. The first was titled “Selling in Mobile Markets” and was presented by Rana Sobany Read more…
Amazon.com and MacMillan, one of the nation’s largest publishers, engaged in a bit of tussle over the last few days. It was about the much-debated (within the publishing industry anyway) pricing Amazon had chosen to offer on Kindle e-book editions of best-selling books. Where a hardcover best-seller might have a retail price of $25 to $30, Kindle Read more…