All Episodes
BTB #295: The Trouble With E-Book Pricing
Consumers are taking to e-books fast – almost as fast as they have taken to the readers and tablets where e-books live in the digital world. A February 2012 report from the Pew Research Center found that one in five US adults had read an e-book in the last year. The...
BTB #294: E-Books – You Can’t Write Just One
The price of e-books is on many people’s minds, including the Federal Department of Justice, which recently sued Apple and three leading publishing houses. At least as much as consumers care about getting the lowest price, however, authors and publishers care about...
PW’s Week Ahead 05.04.12
The parties returned to Judge Denny Chin’s Manhattan courtroom yesterday for motions in the Google Books Case. The search engine giant sought to remove the Authors Guild as an associational plaintiff, even as the Guild pushed for its own motion to certify the class of...
BTB #293: Can Music Pay?
It’s the age of the one-man band, but the picture looks different from days past. Along with the drum on a strap, and a harmonica on a metal brace, the performer now carries a laptop – and with that and an Internet connection, she or he records and distributes music,...
PW’s Week Ahead 04.27.12
A major publisher moves to kill DRM (Digital Rights Management). It's more good news for e-book consumers, but in corners of the publishing industry, fears persist. Will holding on save the business? -- or sink it? "Tor Books, the venerable sci-fi imprint of Macmillan...
BTB #292: Rescue Newspapers, Save Democracy
In early April, local businessmen acquired the Philadelphia Inquirer and related media properties for $55 million. Led by Lewis Katz and George E. Norcross III, the investors purchased Philadelphia Media Network (PMN) for a fraction of the $515 million paid in 2006 by...
PW’s Week Ahead 04.20.12
O to be in England, now that April’s there. And in 2012, in London, the scene is not nearly as idyllic as in Browning’s verse: The great metropolis is in the final throes of preparation for Olympic game and royal jubilee festivals. It has not gone without notice,...
OnCopyright 2012 Interviews
Interviews from CCC’s OnCopyright 2012
BTB #291: Not Sharing, Not Stealing – Infringement
At the recent OnCopyright 2012 conference, Robert Levine explained for the audience in a keynote speech how the commonly used language of copyright shapes the debate and makes for confusion on the fundamentals “I don't think copyright infringement is stealing,” he...
PW’s Week Ahead 04.13.12
“Baffling.” That’s the take from the CEO of the American Booksellers Association. “A big win” says Amazon, speaking not for the e-tailer but – it says – for Kindle owners. “An intrusion into the business sector by the federal government in a manner that is designed to...
BTB #290: Top Agent Calls Amazon ‘Innovative’
Publishing. It’s a business of words. Yet, definitions of many common words in publishing’s vocabulary are evolving and mutating. What we mean by authors, agents, and even publishers is no longer clear. The man who discovered Tom Clancy in the early 1980s, and...
PW’s Week Ahead 04.06.12
Surveys and polls are in the news – not on the presidential campaign, but on the rise of e-books in the US and the rest of the world. The French and the Japanese have something in common, it turns out, while in Brazil and India – two of the so-called BRICS group of...