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Microsoft rolls out the Zune to go up against the iPod in 2006. And then, three years later, a new Zune HD to vie with the iPod Touch.  The Zune gets more traction with late-night talk-show comedians than with consumers. Both the player and the brand are now dead. Burger King gives away a free AOL Music download with every Original Whopper. The download code is on the burger wrapper — try not to get grease on your screen! McDonald’s begins renting DVDs. Actually, this one wasn’t a total flop: Turns out people don’t want DVDs with their fries, but Redbox, which now has

Editor's note: Huffington Posts' Anis Shivani interviews publishing visionary Richard Nash. Check out Richard Nash's Guest Column in the September/October issue of Book Business, coming soon!

I've been intrigued by Richard Eoin Nash since the time he ran the indie press Soft Skull Press in the 2000s. His new enterprise is Red Lemonade/Cursor, a reader/participant-oriented publishing venture hoping to take full advantage of the social potential of new media. I recently had the opportunity to talk to him via email about the future of publishing in a rapidly changing landscape.

Carol Aebersold and her daughter, Chanda Bell, knew they had a winning idea when they transformed their family tradition into a book, “The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition.” But when they submitted the book—about how Santa disperses helper elves to watch boys and girls during the holidays and report back to him nightly at the North Pole—to publishers, no one wanted to take a chance on the concept.

The problems of poetry are many. It can be difficult to discover. It can be difficult to read and interpret. Are you reading it right? Are you interpreting it right? Are you sure?

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, LibreDigital presented new data on how readers have sampled book content online over the past 18 months. According to LibreDigital, it has powered more than 500 million page views of sample book chapters and content for publishers, authors, retailers and social-networking sites.

45 Number of James Patterson titles that have appeared on The New York Times Best-Seller List—a Guinness World Record. Patterson received the honor from Guinness at this year’s BookExpo America.

"Wherever women are, we are,” says Malle Vallik, director, digital content and interactivity for Harlequin Enterprises. You’ll hear this mantra uttered by other Harlequin executives, but it is much more than corporate speak. It is part of a “deliberate strategy,” says Vallik, and the driving force behind Harlequin’s evolution over the past 60 years.

76,000 The number of copies of “Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska’s Political Establishment Upside Down,” by Kaylene Johnson—the only biography of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin—regional publisher Epicenter Press printed in a few days, due to an overwhelming, nationwide demand in the week following the announcement of her Republican vice-presidential nomination. That same week, Zondervan announced that it would release a biography of Palin in October entitled “Sarah Palin: A New Kind of Leader.” Source: Book Business Extra, Sept. 12, 2008 10,000 Number of copies Barnes & Noble (B&N) originally ordered of Robert Kuttner’s “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of

The Web is an ever-changing animal. Keeping that in mind, the most successful online marketing executives must think in the future tense: coming up with inventive, original ideas to help publishers stay ahead of the game. Jeff Yamaguchi, associate director of online marketing for Random House Inc. division The Doubleday Publishing Group, is one such innovator, and he fills us in on a little secret—that the future tense is not enough. In June, Yamaguchi launched Doubleday’s newly revamped Web site, which uses a WordPress platform to simulate the look and usability of a blog while maintaining Doubleday’s integrity and standards as a

As the founder of Internet service provider Juno, Charles Ardai knows a thing or two about making a big splash on the Web. When Ardai sold his company in 2001, the entrepreneur and writer, then all of 32 years old, decided to pursue his dream of reviving the pulp-fiction genre by starting his own publishing company, Hard Case Crime. He knew from the beginning that success would require good online-selling tools. “It’s a pretty popular genre,” Ardai notes, “but it is a genre, and there is a certain fan base that loves this stuff. If you can find one of those fans, the