All Episodes
The Sharing Game
Data – it's not just for engineers anymore. We eat, breathe, sleep, and live in a world of data – a myriad points of information recorded constantly on smartphones and laptops and Fitbits. For businesses and individuals, all the captured data helps inform decisions –...
A Book Is A Book
When is a book not a book? This week, that riddle has two possible answers. A book is not a book when it’s an e-book, of course. When the Hachette Book Group reported their fourth quarter results this week, e-book sales fell year over year, and now make up 22 percent...
What Does It Mean To Be A Reader?
The relationship between books and readers is changing. This is as true for the publishing industry as it is for liberal arts colleges around the country. What does it mean today to be a reader? How do some of the oldest, most traditional books help us “read” the...
We Bought America’s Most Iconic Bookstore
In 2015, Kristen Gilligan and Len Vlahos agreed to purchase the Tattered Cover Bookstore from longtime owner Joyce Meskis. The deal was front page news in Denver, but the move left the couple wondering, "What do we now?" For the opening keynote of this weekend's...
Clicks to Bricks?
Books are the longstanding foundation of Amazon’s e-commerce retailing experience. Last fall, ahead of the holiday shopping season, Amazon moved beyond one-click shopping and opened its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle. This week, signs pointed to many more...
Mass Digitization – Progress, Goals, and Roadblocks
Technology companies today are willing and able to digitize copyrighted works on a scale never imagined before. Copyright owners have raised concerns over their right to do so, and the consequences of mass digitization on publishers’ businesses and accessibility of...
Amazon and The Empty Storefronts Mystery
At the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute meeting this week in Denver, indie booksellers heard their online nemesis Amazon branded a monopolist and a tax evader. Douglas Preston, who has led the Authors United movement to force the Dept of Justice to...
Indian Publishers Gain By Translation
Translation, as Salman Rushdie has noted, has its roots in the Latin for “bearing across.” Rushdie – born in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was known then – acknowledges the common fear that something always gets lost in translation, yet he hopes, too, that something can be...
The Threat From Amazon
On Wednesday, January 27, in Washington, the New America think tank plans an open discussion on “Amazon’s Book Monopoly : A Threat to Freedom of Expression?” with author Scott Turow and Smashwords founder Mark Coker,” among others. New America says it is “committed to...
The Risks of Reporting From North Korea
The 38th parallel dividing the Korean peninsula is not the only line Suki Kim has ever crossed. An award-winning novelist and a journalist, Kim emigrated with her family from Seoul to New York City when she was 13. Over a number of officially sanctioned visits to...
Librarians Face “Quiet” 2016
The new year has opened quietly for the book world, but particularly in the e-book market. Barring the unexpected, 2016 sizes up as a period uninterrupted by game-changing new devices and disruptive business models. Even in these tranquil times, though, the winds of...
All-in-One Conference: Copyright and Technology
It’s a truism in intellectual property that copyright legislation is in a never-ending race with technology, and always playing catch-up. When copyright and technology first found themselves in this circular arrangement, the disruptive technology of the moment was the...