ENTRIES TAGGED "business"
Publishing News: Week in Review
Amazon launched Cloud Drive, the Google Books settlement might get complicated, and good data leads to good business.
In the latest Publishing News: Amazon extended its reach into the cloud, Dana Newman looked at overlapping issues between the Google Book settlement and Golan v. Holder, and what publishers need to do with all that data.
Content is a Service Business
What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.
Computerworld: The Coming Ebook Revolution
Last week I linked to a phenomenal piece over on ArsTechnica on the future of digital books (and in the process neglected to thank Peter Brantley for the link). Today Mike Shatzkin (a co-author on the StartWithXML Report) passed along a pointer to another great article, this one from Computerworld's Mike Elgan listing six reasons that ebooks are about to…
For a Workflow Change, Support from the Top is Required
Last week Laura Dawson and I spoke about StartWithXML to a group of IT and operations people from publishers at the User Group meeting for Global Turnkey Systems, a company owned by one of our lead sponsors, Klopotek. We got some great questions afterwards. On reflection, we realized that they touched an important theme: the need for CEO-level support for…
TOC Recommended Reading
The Future Is A Foreign Country (Timo Hannay, Nascent) As with my journey to Japan, my personal response to all this internet-enabled weirdness was one of almost unadulterated joy. The fact that it is disrupting publishing is, I think, the single most important reason that I've come into the industry. How boring the last 550 years since Gutenberg have…
The Inertia of Digital Turf Wars
Two recent news stories illustrate the problems that arise when traditional businesses go after digital envelope pushers.
Roundup: Borders Mulling Sale, Blogs to Books
Borders explores possible sale, Fractal Press taps personal finance bloggers for book