January 1, 2012
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Publishers And Booksellers See A ‘Predatory’ Amazon
January 24, 2012
Publishers and booksellers are looking for new ways to compete with the Goliath of online retailers. Just before Christmas, Amazon infuriated booksellers with an app that allowed customers to check out prices in brick and mortar stores and then get a discount if they bought from Amazon instead.
Niche No More: Survey Shows Tablets Are Everywhere
January 24, 2012
A new survey indicates that 29 percent of American adults now own a tablet computer and/or an e-reader. That number went up 11 percent in just a few weeks, a sure sign that the gadgets were given as holiday gifts and have reached the point of mass acceptance
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Niche No More: Survey Shows Tablets Are Everywhere
Talk Nerdy To Me: Three Reads For Your Inner Geek
January 21, 2012
Smart, scintillating reads are hard to find — especially when you like your protagonists nerdy. Author Lev Grossman offers three great reads for the geeks in all of us. Namely, “Possession” by A.S. Byatt, “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson and “Fifth Business” by Robertson Davies and Gail Godwin.
More here:
Lev Grossman is the author of The Magician King, the sequel to The Magician. He is a senior writer and book critic for Time.
The Age of Austerity – How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics – By Thomas Byrne Edsall – Book Review
January 20, 2012
Scarcity turns modest policy differences into showdowns between “haves” and “have-nots,” Thomas Edsall writes.
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The Age of Austerity – How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics – By Thomas Byrne Edsall – Book Review
Update: Look for Thomas Byrne Edsall on the Dylan Ratigan Show on msnbc on Tuesday, January, 24th.
Apple Pushes To Put Textbooks On iPads
January 19, 2012
Apple Inc. on Thursday launched its attempt to make the iPad a replacement for a satchel full of textbooks by starting to sell electronic versions of a handful of standard high school books.
How to Be the Photograph
December 19, 2011
There was reason to expect some personal revelations when the musician and writer Patti Smith took the stage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a Friday evening in early December. She was there to talk about Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and indefatigable promoter of modern art whom O’Keeffe married in 1924. An exhibition upstairs in the Tisch Galleries—showcasing the works of art that O’Keeffe had selected from Stieglitz’s private collection and given to the Met in 1949, including some of his erotic photographic portraits of O’Keeffe herself—was the immediate occasion for Smith’s appearance, along with the publication of the first volume of letters by O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, which Smith carried onto the stage like a bible, festooned with yellow Post-it notes.
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How to Be the Photograph
Love Goes to Buildings on Fire — Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever — by Will Hermes
December 13, 2011
The Bronx may have been burning, but downtown Manhattan’s mid-’70s music scene was even hotter.
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Love Goes to Buildings on Fire — Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever — By Will Hermes — Book Review
Books Get Special Packaging
December 7, 2011
Taking a page from the music industry, is the book publishing business looking to maintain the sales base of physical books by providing special packaging as an incentive for buyers to purchase the physical copy over a digital e-book?
According to the New York Times, many publishers are exploring just that option on a select group of titles that might appeal to such an audience. The TImes quotes Evan Schnittman, a marketing exec at Bloomsbury who says, “we need to think about what the physical qualities of a book might be that makes someone stop and say, ‘well there’s convenience reading, and then there’s book owning and reading,” putting an emphasis on packaging and collectibility over the mere convenience of reading on an e-reader
Spiegel & Grau’s Julie Grau echoed the same sentiment as it relates to their publishing of Jay-Z’s recent lyric based book, “Decoded.” “We’re rethinking the value in certain cases of special effects and higher production standards,” Ms. Grau said.
Recent titles such as Jay-Z’s “Decoded,” Stephen King’s “11/22/63″ and Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84,” have featured special packaging, with “IQ84″ bucking the trend by selling nearly three-quarters of its copies in physical format as opposed to digital.
Holiday season is typically when entertainment firms release the greatest number of special packed items for obvious gift-giving reasons. Whether, like in music, this will become a trend of the future is anyone’s guess, but based on early sales indications, there may be a market for upgraded versions of selected titles coming in the not too distant future.
More here.
Branson: It’s Time To Rethink ‘Business As Usual’
December 3, 2011
Richard Branson built a global business empire with the philosophy “have fun and the money will come.” The founder of Virgin Group now argues that it’s time to rethink the way businesses function. In his new book, “Screw Business As Usual”, he says you can make money by doing good.
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Branson: It’s Time To Rethink ‘Business As Usual’
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