The Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry 2010: Facts, Trends, Outlook. Industry leaders discuss the business of publishing today. Wednesday, October 6, 2010, 14:30 – 16:00 Frankfurt Book Fair, hall 4.2, Room Dimension Organiser: Livres Hebdo with buchreport, Publishers Weekly and The Bookseller. What is the state of the publishing industry? What are the powerhouses, [...]

The Future Face of Media: Business Models for the Digital Era. Frankfurt, May 18, 2010. It was great fun and highly inspiring to moderate two panels with top media leaders on the “Future of news and news publishing” in Frankfurt organized by Mark Schiffhauer for the Maleki Group. The prestigious group of speakers at the [...]

Es ist bemerkenswert, dass all die heiß umstrittenen Themen in der aktuellen Debatte rund ums Buch – seine kulturelle Stellung als Kulturgut, das Urheberrecht, die Rolle der Verlage und des Handels – in so gut wie allen gängigen Standarddefinitionen des Buches seit dem 19. Jahrhundert nicht einmal angesprochen werden. Und viele kolportierte Thesen über Trends [...]

The wonderful journal “Logos” has published a tink piece I wrote on the “future of the book” or, more precisely, on what e-Books and digitization may have changed – or not changed at all – about books: What is a book? And, what’s really in it? These two simple questions are getting both more complicated [...]

Tracking news about how the crisis affects publishing over the past two months produces some strange findings. Almost instantly, starting as of  November 2008, we saw predictions about how the crisis would hit the industry. Then in December – and now again, with the year’s end reporting – we are told that notably in the [...]

This has been said, almost a year ago, by my old friend Mike Shatzkin in a remarkable address at last year’s BookExpo America in New York, which include very practical suggestions as to what publishers and booksellers can do. Here are 2 more quotes: “It seems intuitively that the explosion of reading on screens — [...]

Publishers Weekly writes that the US children classic Dr. Seuss is going digital, thanks to a partnership between Dr. Seuss Enterprises and kidthing, a new content distribution platform. The website kidthing is to go online later this month. Sometimes, too quick is too late. Publishers Lunch informed us only the day before expiration of the offer [...]

Co-Blogger Simon Owens told me more details about the Sci/fi publisher Tor Books and his new way of giving away fre eBooks. In his own blog “bloggasm“, he writes:  ”Two sources who spoke to me on condition of anonymity said that it’s intended to be a “go-to site, a central community” for science fiction and [...]

Within only a few weeks, I came across all sorts of news refering to big publishing conglomerates and small indiependent houses who launch or announced  new approaches to putting books onto the internet. And at the same time, a new debate about eventual business models has started – anywhere between giving away all the stuff for free [...]

Here you can find Paulo Coelho’s new megaseller “The Witch of Portobello” – for free. Oh, and yes, it is entirely legal. Courtesy of Harper Collins, Coelho’s US publisher. Why they give away Coelho’s new book digitally? In order to sell it on paper, of course. And Harper decided, as of today, to start putting [...]