Today In Book Publishing

Technology and innovation probably aren’t the words that come to mind when you think about your local grocery store. Bar code scanners in the 1970s were probably the last recent advancement in the grocery store industry. As you’ll see in this article, however, at least one grocery chain is leveraging a new form of technology…

As book publishers adapt to a world where both print and digital editions are desirable to readers, it is important for us to focus on formatting the content in a way that best suits how it is being read. But what readers, authors, publishers, and retailers often forget...

Survey the landscape, and you will see authors who are taking marketing into their own hands and successfully creating audiences and loyal followings without help from their publishers. Authors have always deployed additional marketing, but new tools and agencies allow them to enact efforts that are at scale and beyond publishers’ bandwidth...

As is the case when any emerging technology is shaking up a market, there are facts and misconceptions that surround that technology. When book publishers think about digital printing, several associations-negative and positive-may come to mind: cost-savings, short-runs, low quality, flexible, amateur...

When the topic of direct-to-consumer sales arises in the book industry, a few key concepts come to mind: ecommerce sites, shopping carts, data analytics, and metadata, to name a few. While certainly important, these technical components of a direct sales strategy are rather worthless if publishers overlook a more abstract concept—that is, a “relationship” with…

Last year Book Business revived our ranking of the Top 20 Book Manufacturers. The ranking is a resource intended to help publishers get a more complete view of the major players in the book printing and manufacturing business. And so we’re proud to announce the Top 20 Book Manufacturers ranking for 2015...

Oyster was a great purist reading experience for its customers but it was a deeply flawed both as a product and a business model. Being US-East Coast-centric, it was taking on Amazon’s more sophisticated readers who expect the widest possible selection of books just a click away...

Though ebook consumption and self-publishing have eaten into traditional book sales, publishers still rely heavily on profits from printed volumes. And new technology is enabling publishers to bring these books to market more efficiently and more profitably. In fact, the publishing industry's sustainability just might hinge on such nimble approaches to business...

Ad blocking is one of the more controversial features of Apple’s new iOS release. Apple prefers to call it “content blocking,” but it’s mostly intended to block all those pesky website ads that nag us every day. Publishers are, of course, totally freaked out at the prospect of their content being consumed without monetizing the…

Book Business is in the ideas game. Everyday we scour the internet and our inboxes, comb through conference notes, and transcribe interviews with leaders in the book industry. We take all this information and try to extract the most important ideas, distributing them in articles, webinars, events, and videos. The Book Business “Big Ideas Issue”…