A panel of ceo’s–Ellen Archer from Hyperion, John Ingram from Ingram, Dominique Raccah from Sourcebooks, and John Donatich from Yale University Press, moderated by F+W’s David Nussbaum–addressed a variety of issues at Digital Book World Tuesday morning. On the encroachments of retailers like Amazon into publishing itself, Raccah observed that “low-hanging fruit is going to go fast. If it’s easy, get out of it.” She is focusing Sourcebooks on “reader-centric models” where they can identify complex problems and serve them. Archer noted that yesterday’s NBC News publishing announcement “was particularly interesting” and said she is looking to “shape my business […]
Archives for January 2012
DBW: Publishing Execs to Invest In Consumer Data and Relationships
“We want to lead the league in insights per minute,” Digital Book World conference chair Mike Shatzkin said at the show’s opening Tuesday morning, and James McQuivey of Forrester Research helped to further that goal with additional reports from their survey of 74 book publishing executives. (We ran initial excerpts the other week.) McQuivey found that 70 percent of those executives polled “believe that to succeed in the future, they must have a direct consumer relationship”–and 66 percent “will invest in acquiring customer data to help accomplish that” in 2012. Executives themselves are split as to what makes for the […]
DBW: Shatzkin’s Opening Thoughts
Digital Book World conference chair Mike Shatzkin began the ever-growing third annual gathering before an expected crowd of 1,600 people or more with a rapid-fire checklist of “the things publishers need to be thinking about in 2012,” many of which drove the agenda of the two-day conference. (As you know, Publishers Lunch and Publishers Launch Conferences are co-presenters of DBW.) Among Shatzkin’s points: “Publishers need to be at least as adventurous and experimental about pricing as authors are on their own.” He pointed out that, while XML has grown, “a lot of useful information is routinely lost between an author’s […]
eNews: Kobo Formally Launches in the Netherlands; Survey Says Tablet Market “Not Set In Stone”; and More
After soft-launch in Holland late last year, Kobo’s will formally roll out their ebookstore there on January 30 with “thousands of Dutch titles,” while Dutch retailer Libris Blz will sell the Kobo Touch for €129. “Through our new partnership with Libris Blz, we’re confident our expansion into the Netherlands will be a huge success,” Kobo ceo Michael Serbinis said in a statement. “Kobo’s focus has always been to bring e-reading and e-books to people everywhere around the world. By launching in the Netherlands, and bringing e-reading to the passionate Dutch reading community — we are one more country closer to […]
Agency Lawsuit Is Expanded; Draws On Information from Amazon
On Friday, the lead law firm in the consolidated class action suits over the agency ebook pricing model Hagens Berman filed an expanded, revised and amended 86-page complaint and promptly issued a press release, as they did with their original filing last August. To understand the case you shouldn’t rely on that release, however, which misspells the name of defendant “Hachett Livre” and trumpets having “uncovered statements” in exotic places like the New Yorker, Steve Jobs’ biography and company blogs. The complaint itself follows the same reasoning as the original filing, basing their allegation of conspiracy on reasoning–that for any […]
People, Etc.
Knopf evp, executive director of publicity, promotion and media relations Paul Bogaards penned the most talked about online item of the day, a Top 100 “Hierarchy of Book Publishing” with the same spirit as some of his inimitable Twitter posts. Bogaards told us by e-mail, “Consider the post a Valentine to our industry, which I love, and honestly, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.” Random House, S&S, Nosy Crow, and Robot Media were among the winners of the 2nd annual Publishing Innovation Awards, announced Monday night as part of the opening of Digital Book World. Full List At Harper UK, group […]