Amazon fired the opening salvo in the latest skirmish over eBooks with mega-publisher Macmillan. Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the world is at odds with Amazon over the pricing of Kindle books, so Amazon deleted all of the “Buy Now” buttons from all Macmillan published titles! I’m sure Amazon can predict the impact [...]

It’s less than a week before Steve Jobs takes the stage atop a unicorn showing the world the fabled Apple Tablet (iSlate). And it appears that Amazon thinks there is going to be a real battle for books. In the past two years, Amazon has used its size to bulldoze its way through publishing. But [...]

It is almost 2010 and despite the rose-colored glasses being handed out by the Amazon PR team, eBooks and print-to-digital products still have a ways to go before becoming mainstream and major streams of revenue. This post is also serving to round out some views I’ve passed along via Twitter recently and in reply to V.Sandbrook.
Publishers [...]

Experimenting. That’s what publishers are doing and it is very cool to think about what the near-future holds. This week I’m playing with two such experiments. One from a magazine publisher, the other from a book publisher.

First, the print magazine. While many magazines are still reeling from economic and industry shifts, Esquire is charging ahead [...]

One of my favorite events of the year is this weekend. It’s the annual WordCamp Birmingham! The schedule is jam packed with great presentations and even a “genius bar” styled workshop. So I hope to walk out with some uber-cool ideas and improvements to the site soon.
Of course, topping the cool chart this year is [...]

I wasn’t able to go to BEA this year, so my online stalking of every attendee and panel confernce has been relentless. So far lots of slides and podcasts and enough video to keep me from running down the street mad. But one trend I started noticing a few weeks ago were the lack of [...]

O’Reilly Media’s Programming Scala won’t hit bookstore shelves for a long time. But the entire working manuscript has been posted to their site! Each and every paragraph, sidenote, chart and graph has a comment box underneath it. They are hoping that the community will contribute knowledgeble bits of information and ideas, which the author will [...]

Amazon announced they will hold an event this Wednesday (May 6th:10 a.m.) in New York. Most are expecting the unveiling of a large-format e-reader geared towards newspaper subscriptions. Which would be a smart move for Amazon, as many newspapers aren’t happy with the Kindle and its inability to serve up newspaper styles content and ads [...]

Little, Brown and Company have a new logo. They are ditching the 70-year-old etching of some Boston-based revolutionary war era memorial called the Bullfinch Monument, for an updated type-only design. Here’s a link to the short New York Observer article, which is worth the read because they take a couple of paragraphs to talk with [...]

I am not enjoying today and have given up listening to NPR and reading blog/tweets until April 2nd. It’s just too much!!!! Ahhhh!!!! NPR got me this morning with the whole 2 minute piece on STEAM. And I haven’t been happy since. 
And now over on the most excellent harperstudio blog, they have announced a new [...]