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Who Can Rival Amazon?
January 22, 2014

Recently my friend Mike Shatzkin asked me to participate in a panel on Amazon at Digital Book World. Mike asked all the panelists a question that I want to attempt to answer at greater length than I was able to at the conference. The question was in two parts:  first, how much more market share can Amazon amass before it slows down or is stopped? Second, who can put together a meaningful merchandising service that could take share from Amazon?

B&N’s Nook Division Loses Its 4th Senior Manager in Less Than a Month
January 21, 2014

There's an old saying about a new year and a new beginning,  and Barnes & Noble is taking it to an extreme. Over the past few weeks no fewer than 4 members of the senior management at Nook Media, B&N's ebook sub, have either left the company, been promoted, or announced that they have one foot out the door.

The first to go was Michael Huseby. Barnes & Noble announced on 8 January that Huseby was leaving his position as head of Nook Media to take the CEO position at Barnes & Noble.

Is Your Content in All The High Visibility Areas?
January 20, 2014

What's your strategy to get your content discovered and read? Most publishers follow the "if you build it, they will come" philosophy. Many of those same publishers won't be around in a few years.

Oyster Raises $14 Million to Expand Library
January 15, 2014

With Netflix soaring, investors are betting that a start-up based on the same business model - but for e-books - will succeed as well.

Oyster, which gives customers access to more than 100,000 books for $10 a month, has raised $14 million in a new round of financing. The new investment was led by Highland Capital Partners and included additional capital from an existing investor, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.

That raises the company's total fund-raising to $17 million.

Stretching A Brand From Print To Digital
January 6, 2014

Can it really be done? Can you take a brand that's well established in the print world and move it to digital?

You might think that's a silly question as it's already been done many times. I'll bet you can rattle off quite a few print brands that have made the jump to digital. But have these print-to-digital brands really been successful? Have they truly maximized their reach and revenue potential? Or have they actually diluted the original print brand? Would they have been better off doing something else instead of stretching the original brand from print to digital?

Digital Publishing: How It Will Evolve in 2014 And Beyond
January 6, 2014

Digital publishing is now a mature, thriving industry, and yet many still insist that publishing is in its death throes. Book publishers know better: While hardcover sales declined slightly between 2008 and 2012 (from $5.2 billion to $5 billion), eBook sales grew at an astonishing clip during that period, rising from $64 million to $3 billion. And while digital publications are typically sold at a lower per-unit cost, profit margins are much higher - from 41 percent to 75 percent as publishers make the transition from print to digital.

No Books Enter Public Domain in 2014
January 3, 2014

A new year means a new batch of copyrights expire, and works like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Bell Jar become as free to use as Charles Dickens or Shakespeare. Unless you happen to live in the United States, that is.

As Duke University notes in its mournful annual report, no books will enter the public domain this year, or next year, or the year after that.  This situation is the result of Congress's decision to add another 20 years of protection for long dead authors, which means that no new works will become public until 2019.

eBooks vs. Print: Actually A Nonissue
December 27, 2013

When I picked up the current Scientific American my eye was immediately drawn to the cover line, "Google Is Changing the Way You Think." Given the sensationalist tone that often accompanies explorations of how Internet use affects cognition, the article was a measured summation of studies that indicate a) we often go online to answer questions we used to ask friends and b) relying on the Internet for information we or our friends used to remember means while we have access to more information than ever, we know less.

What To Expect In 2014
December 23, 2013

Predictions are dangerous, mostly because they can always come back to haunt you. Take a look at this list of the 10 Worst Tech Predictions of All Time and you'll see what I mean.

A wise person once pointed out that changes expected in the short term typically take longer to materialize and changes expected in the long term often happen sooner. With that in mind, I'm sticking my neck out and predicting the following digital content developments in 2014 (or 2015...):