Along with ALA Midwinter, the publishing conference calendar for 2017 opened this week with a trimmed down and refocused Digital Book World show returning to New York City. As keynote speaker, Macmillan CEO John Sargent offered some candid remarks on the state of the business, reports Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly senior writer.
“Sargent told attendees that the digital part of the business – which fell 16% among traditional publishers in 2016, according to Nielsen – will decline again in 2017. At the same time, he acknowledged that self-publishing and Amazon’s subscription service, Kindle Unlimited, were large, and getting larger,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.
“His takeaway? That if self-publishing is growing, and traditional publishers are not shrinking, there is a lot of reading going on, and that better data and analytics will help publishers compete,” Albanese adds.
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Every Friday, CCC’s “Beyond the Book” speaks with the editors and reporters of “Publishers Weekly” for an early look at the news that publishers, editors, authors, agents and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.