All Episodes
Apple Loses, Readers Win
In New York at the Digital Book World Conference, the Four Horsemen rode onto the center stage. But predictions of imminent apocalypse were likely overstated. One path to short-term salvation for the book business may be the pot of gold at the end of the Apple e-books...
Sleeping Through A Revolution
Delivering more of a wake-up call than a keynote speech, Jonathan Taplin today told the opening session in New York City of Digital Book World Conference + Expo 2016 that while he wishes content were king, “I am worried that platform is king.” He urged attendees to...
City Lights Balances Business & “Poetic Sensibility”
Last month at the PubWest 2016 Conference, City Lights Publisher Elaine Katzenberger accepted the annual Jack D. Rittenhouse Award, presented in Santa Fe, NM. City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti was unable to attend; the energetic 96-year-old recently attended...
Data Not Content Is Now Publishers’ Product
Information is the new petroleum. Just as oil and its by-products, including gasoline, drove innovation and development in the 20th century, information will spearhead change across the decades of the 21st century. Industry analyst Doug Laney has defined infonomics as...
Take Two For Hachette, Perseus And Ingram
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. The 2014 deal for Hachette to purchase Perseus eventually fell apart, but the parties announced this week they’re ready for “take two” on the deal. On Tuesday, Hachette – the publisher of novelists Donna Tartt and...
The Role of Text Mining at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals
Text mining is beginning to establish its place across the life sciences industry as a way for researchers to quickly analyze massive amounts of literature, as well as conference abstracts, patents and clinical data to help inform and guide R&D. From drug...
The Technology of the Book
New technologies engage the human mind in many ways. Depending on one's perspective, the latest gadget is either a miracle or a menace. Michael Greer, who teaches the online course The Technology of the Book: Past, Present, and Future for the University of...
One More Senate Battle Ahead?
This week, President Obama nominated Carla Hayden to become the 14th Librarian of Congress. The selection follows the January retirement of James Billington, a Reagan appointee who came to office in 1987. Hayden will replace David Mao, who currently serves as the...
Creative Edge Publishing
At this month’s PubWest 2016 Conference, Jim Childs, publisher at Rowman & Littlefield’s Globe Pequot, Lyons Press, and Falcon Guides, offered “a tour of ‘non-book’ thinking from all over the place.” As Childs noted in his lunchtime keynote at the LaFonda Hotel in...
The Agile Publisher
Publishing in 2016 is a technology business. That’s been true for some time, of course. Yet the technology-driven approach to business is profoundly and fundamentally different from traditional publishing practices. How can and will scholarly publishers reconcile...
Our Man In Havana
Ernest Hemingway spent many years in Cuba and was living there when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He told a Cuban television reporter at the time that he was proud to be the first cubano sato to be a Nobel laureate. Hemingway of course knew some...
We Are Not Strangers Here
In a keynote address for the recent PubWest Conference 2016, novelist Mira Jacob spoke passionately of the importance of finding and cultivating voices that speak to the myriad of American experiences. For an earlier publishing gathering, those words went unheard,...