Archive
Green Spin
It’s not often that I commend the publishing industry on a brilliant piece of tactical maneuvering. But I have to say that the recent spinning adopted [subscription required, sorry] (by John Makinson among others) to justify abolishing sale or return terms on environmental grounds is absolute genius:
Penguin c.e.o. John Makinson has mooted a move to [...]
Published: August 17, 2007. Read more →
When HMV Shuts Up Shop - Then What?
One of my ongoing, late-night publishing speculations - up there in likelihood with Penguin being sold off to HarperCollins, or Canongate sold to Bloomsbury - is the idea that “beleaguered high street retailer HMV” will pull the plug on the Waterstones chain of bookshops because there’s just no money in books anymore.
Of course, they won’t [...]
It’s all about the content, stupid
This precedes a long posting on the massive - fundamental - importance of hman beings and hand-written content for web sites, but I just thought I’d share three links from the superb A List Apart website about writing for the web. [Via Alex]
Reviving Anorexic Web Writing
Better Writing Through Design
In fact, the whole dang ALA archive [...]
Published: August 3, 2007. Read more →
Mitch Albom - For One More Day
Here’s a new thing.
The thing is a holding page for a project we’ve got coming out in the autumn, for the absolutely-huge-selling author Mitch Albom.
Published: July 27, 2007. Read more →
How big publishing companies should innovate.
If you work for a big publishing company, and want to find ways to innovate, then read this article from the Press Gazette. Now. [Link via BookTwo]
As we know, (book) publishing is desperate to find successful new commercial models online. But how many publishers are really innovating? And if they are, how many are set [...]
Published: July 8, 2007. Read more →
Jelinek publishes online
Brilliant.
“I find the Internet to be the most wonderful thing there is,” Jelinek said in an e-mail interview with The Associated Press. “It connects people. Everyone can have input.”
Jelinek, 60, has been posting chapters of the new book, “Neid” (German for “Envy”), as she writes them. The first two chapters of the work she describes [...]
Published: July 5, 2007. Read more →
More Links, 29 June 2007
I’ve got too many tabs open and need to get these off:
With shades of Tom Cruise in Magnolia, Respect the Pixel Grid (Geeky)
O’Reilly Tools of Change presentations et al (via BookTwo.org)
Doubleclick Report about the drivers in ecommerce
Lots of Add To Basket buttons
This is very, very, very important. DRM for books (Medialoper, “Will Publishers Learn [...]
Published: June 29, 2007. Read more →
Links, 29 June 2007
Prince is giving away his new album, for free, with the Mail on Sunday. How awesome is that? Interesting not only from a Chris Anderson style perspective (that the future is free content, and paid-for experiences, i.e. gigs; see “Give away the music and sell the show“) but also because it is a totally new [...]
Today we like.
BigShinyThing has got het up about Facebook. Which seems to be a fair position to take. But in the same article, which is one of those oh-so-paranoid-oh-so-activist pieces they do so well, they mention the Google Will Eat Itself project (fantastic idea!):
We generate money by serving Google text advertisements on a network of hidden [...]
Published: June 23, 2007. Read more →
Links, 21 June 2007
Sicko as a litmus test for the positive or negative effects of file-sharing on commercial releases..
More on the power of BitTorrent: OJ’s “confession” leaked to BT It is quite intriguing that “sensitive” or banned material can be leaked in this way. Thing is, it must be relatively obvious who did it?
And again on piracy/ [...]
Published: June 21, 2007. Read more →