Late Thursday morning, Simba’s Michael Norris introduced “Giving it Away: When Free eBooks Make Sense And When They Don’t” by citing, as all ebook-related panels seem to these days, with some statistics. According to a survey Simba recently published about ebook buying and reading habits, 8% of the US adult population bought at least one book in 2008 – but 15% of them said they had read an ebook. Discrepancies between what people buy and read are common, but for the purposes of this panel, it was a natural segue to talk of whether giving books away for free online […]
Archives for May 2009
People: Krieger to Retire
Associate publisher of Simon & Schuster Children’s Aladdin imprint Ellen Krieger will retire at the end of June after fifteen years at the company. While at S&S, she oversaw the merging of Pocket’s middle grade and teen imprints into the Children’s division’s Aladdin and Pulse imprints and launched Aladdin Mix. She comments: “It’s hard to imagine a more satisfying last chapter of my publishing career than my fifteen years at Simon & Schuster, shepherding Aladdin…through a number of exciting incarnations. I’m not sure what the next chapter will be; right now, I’m looking forward to not setting an alarm, and […]
Conroy Cancels BEA Appearances
The biggest surprise in the lead-up to Book Expo America was news yesterday that author Pat Conroy had to cancel his two planned appearances at the show. Via his agent Marly Rusoff, Conroy communicates that he is recovering from surgery, and “otherwise he would be at BEA, which he has always loved attending. He especially regrets being unable to sign with his daughter, Melissa Conroy, who has her first book out, in which he is a character.” (Her picture book POPPY’S PANTS publishes in September.) Doubleday will still have copies SOUTH OF BROAD, his first novel in 14 years, at […]
Shatzkin's New Big Ideas for Publishing's Future
This morning’s biggest Big Idea presentation came from consultant and publishing theorist Mike Shatzkin, who expanded his previously-presented master thesis that general trade publishing will fade and “the future means ‘vertical’ and ‘community'” to look more broadly at what publishing will look like in 20 years. Perhaps the biggest extrapolation was this: “Something we don’t pay enough attention to is that anybody with a web site is a publisher. Not all publishers are content creators, but they need content. That is the big unfolding opportunity for publishing and the people in it over the net 20 or 30 years.” Put […]
The Ties that Bind: ABA Opening Keynote Session
It took quite a while for the ABA’s opening keynote to get past the preambles and underway. Roughly a half hour into the allotted time, R.J. Julia owner Roxanne Coady explained that the panel’s purpose was “to talk a little bit about the partnership between authors and booksellers – formerly the bedrock of our literary landscape” at a time of “extraordinary disintermediation.” There’s an assumption about independents, she explained, of a “Mom and Pop/Apple Pie theory – that we have to exist”–but she suggested it’s more a matter of the “cute pet theory – we want them around, just not […]
EU to Consider Closer Look at Google Settlement
Germany plans to ask the European Commission to take a closer look at the Google Book Search settlement and the library scanning program, and “France, Austria and the Netherlands also said to be keen to have the issue put on the table.” One European diplomat says there is concern about putting the European digital library Europeana (which presents public domain works only) on an equal footing with Google’s book database. A separate article reports that “EU competitiveness ministers meeting in Brussels tomorrow and Friday are likely to ask the Commission to launch an investigation into the implications of the project […]