Joseph Esposito

Michael Weinstein is a member of the Publishing Executive Hall of Fame and has 35 years experience in production, manufacturing, content management and change management.

He is currently Production Director for Teachers College Press. Previously, he was Vice President, Global Content and Media Production for Cengage Learning. Prior to that he was Vice President of Production and Manufacturing for Oxford University Press, Pearson/Prentice Hall, Worth Publishers and HarperCollins.

In those capacities, he has been a leader in managing process and content for delivery in as many ways possible.

As University Presses look to sidestep problems with traditional bookstores, library budget cuts, and the dominant role of Amazon, the attraction of selling direct-to consumers (D2C) is growing. Just about all University Presses are trying to sell books directly from their websites, but overall the success rate is not outstanding.

I’d bookmarked several articles this week waxing philosophical about the fate of the bookstore, and it seems I am not the only one who noticed this trend: Laura Hazard Owen did a nice round-up for GigaOM summarizing the contributions from some main players. Joseph Esposito, Mike Shatzkin and Seth Godin all approach the book issue from [...]

The post The Battle for Bookstores: Who’s their ideal customer now? appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Steve Earle wrote: “The revolution starts now / when you rise above your fear / And tear the walls around you down / The revolution starts here.”

Thankfully, time has finally brought us companies (big and small) that are re-thinking traditional content distribution business models. They’ve done this based on shifting technologies, shifting culture, sinking economies, new demands, and have begun creating new approaches. There are many out there, I wanted to mention a few examples.

From The Scholarly Kitchen comes this delightful essay about e-books and the personal library. The author, Joseph Esposito, writes a surprisingly nuanced piece on the print-fetishist-steps-into-digital-age theme. While Esposito does lament his lost print books, he also embraces the digital age and is a realist about the economies of print ownership: “We had been told that [...]

University presses publish plenty of books that are read only by academics. They also publish plenty of books that are read by no one. Inventory research has suggested that as much as half of a library’s holdings never circulate.

“We are very good at figuring out what kinds of books our patrons are going to want,” said Rick Anderson, associate dean for scholarly resources and collections at the University of Utah, at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses here on Tuesday.

We’ve heard a lot of people arguing that publishers should fight Amazon by dropping DRM. However, in The Scholarly Kitchen, Joseph Esposito has written a long and thoughtful piece looking at the possible drawbacks of this approach. Esposito first looks at the question of whether unauthorized sharing of e-books increases the market for them. His [...]

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