Amazon Has Publishing Fire
Published December 6th, 2011 | 
You can almost set your citizen watch by it: Every Christmas season for the past several years, Amazon has had some major news to lay on its customers. This year is no different. First, Amazon cut prices on the Kindle and released the Kindle Fire. Now, they are in the process of acquiring Children’s Book Publisher, Marshall Cavendish to add to the growing list of imprints in the Amazon Publishing empire. Meanwhile, Apple and the big mainstream publishers are in hot water over the “Agency Model” for e-book publishing. EU watchdogs are investigating Apple, Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Germany’s Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck for anti-trust violations. There’s No denying it. Amazon has made all they right decisions when it comes to advancing its publishing agenda.
Not In Demand
Published October 20th, 2011 | Anyone who writes for Demand Media Studio has probably noticed the title draught. I was away from demand for a couple of months and returned last week to an empty assignment pool. It seems, these days, you have about as much chance of getting an assignment as DMS as you do of getting low cost electricity for your home. I suppose with the failure of Demand’s IPO and the subsequent Google Panda release, it was inevitable that Demand’s salad days were a thing of the past. Seems a sure bet that Demand’s days are numbered.
Barnes and Noble’s Greatest Fear
Published September 1st, 2011 | This year is really blowing by quick. Next week it will be Labor Day, the unofficial end of Summer. Pretty soon, will be whipping out the long john and getting ready to send out holiday cards. That will be good news for bookstores, as the holiday season is when they tend to do most of their business . . . or, maybe not. According to Simba Information, a media firm that studies trends in the the book trade, found that more and more, bookstore patrons are using physical bookstores as a showroom. They do their browsing in physical bookstores then buy the book or e-book online. That does not surprise me in the least. After my friend’s book store went out of business over a decade ago, I all but stopped buying from traditional book stores. I’d go to Barnes and Noble and look around, but I’d inevitably buy my books from Amazon. Although, Simba admits that this casual browsing trend only accounts for about 10% of the book market, it is a sobering fact for many bookstores.
