Shatzkin

Peter McCarthy and Mike Shatzkin have joined forces on a new venture, The Logical Marketing Agency, a digital marketing services-provider for publishers and authors. The company is offering a range of title- and author-optimization and research options at prices scaled to fit publishing budgets. The founders expect to provide solutions both for individual authors - mainly through a web portal - and for the largest companies.

Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of publishing consultancy The Idea Logical Company and ” widely-acknowledged thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry,” has just run a blog post entitled “Marketing will replace editorial as the driving force behind publishing houses”—so at least there’s no doubt about what his thesis is. He says, [...]

The post Shatzkin outs marketing, not editorial, as new driving force in publishing — world yawns appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

On Tuesday, the embattled baby changing station Barnes & Noble released its quarterly report and announced that it would no longer produce the Zune Nook tablet in house. And, while the Zune Nook’s catastrophic failure has rightfully received a great deal of attention over the last few days, there were a number of other uncomfortable and unfortunate truths in the report, including that Barnes & Noble is maybe not that good at selling books anymore, either (though it is still better at selling books than it is at selling tablets)

There is no such thing as a dog-eared e-book — each copy is forever perfect. But a new Amazon patent could go a long way toward making the digital media in our lives a lot more like the physical version.

Last week, Amazon patented a way to sell “used” e-books, music, videos, apps and other “digital objects.” The marketplace described in the patent would let such exchanges take place by cutting off the seller’s access to a piece of digital content once the buyer paid.

The holiday season was not a happy one for Barnes & Noble, judging by latest sales figures released by the company.
Sales of their Nook products, which Barnes & Noble has been pushing over the past several months, dropped 12.6 percent to $311 million over the shopping season and total sales of retail operations also experienced a steep decline, dropping 10.9 percent to $1.2 billion. The company did not release sales figures detailing the number of Nook e-readers sold.

As we mentioned yesterday, the marketplace of ideas around what the Random House/Penguin merger all means is heating up. The Financial Times' Robert Cookson looks at bigness vs. smallness and might vs. agility as competing strategies for success in an increasingly digital world. In smallness' corner is indie house Salt Publishing's Christopher Hamilton-Emery:

“I don’t think big necessarily means better." The rise of digital publishing, he argues, is likely to lead to an “explosion” of smaller, more focused publishers that can harness technology to establish relationships directly with consumers.