ENTRIES TAGGED "strategy"
In-depth insight from Tim O'Reilly on lessons learned from Safari Books Online
"As I outlined above, Safari adopted a "cloud library" model rather than downloadable ebooks as its fundamental design metaphor. I thought it might be worthwhile to understand how we arrived at that decision, as well as some of the other lessons we've learned over what is now 22 years of ebook publishing experience. (O'Reilly published its first ebook, Unix in…
"We had all the advantages and let it slip away"
Among the most honest assessments of the failure of newspapers to adapt to the Web comes from John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News. The whole thing is unflinching, powerful, and nearly every word worth reading if you're part of a media company hoping to survive the current digital environment, much less the…
Do the Math on Your Mobile Apps
One of my favorite sources of interesting reading material these days is Hacker News (follow them at @newsycombinator), and this week they pointed me to a piece from Derek Sivers that applies to many of the emerging digital and mobile markets for media: He kept saying, "If only one percent of the people reading this magazine buy my CD……
Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.
One of the big risk factors publishers think about when it comes to digital books is that they will cannibalize print sales. Factor in the lower prices we're seeing for ebooks, and it's a quite reasonable concern. Looking at data on sales from our website, at first glance that would appear to be exactly what's happening. But that's not the full story. If there really was cannibalization happening, you'd expect to see our print sales underperforming the overall computer book market, but that's not what's happening.
"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"
A thoughtful piece from Michael Nielsen on the disruption of the scientific publishing industry includes a lot that's very relevant to other publishers and media companies. For example: In conversations with editors I repeatedly encounter the same pattern: "But idea X won't work / shouldn't be allowed / is bad because of Y." Well, okay. So what? If you're…
Essential Points in the Free Debate
The signal to noise ratio around free models is obscuring a number of key points. Here's a few worth discussing.