Seth Godin announced to great fanfare and hubub in the blog world that he will no longer publish his books through a traditional publisher.
Some see this as a big author shaking off the shackles of evil publishers; some publishers see this as Godin taking advantage of the investment traditional publishing made on his behalf, by [...]
The Montreal/Texas band Arcade Fire has just released a new album, Suburbs. Arcade Fire is about as big as indie bands get, and their plan is to stay indie – as far as I know.
You can buy the new album here:
http://www.arcadefire.com/ …
And some interesting notes about how you can buy:
* Premium digital ($7.99)
* CD + [...]
I posted a new thing over at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change blog, Sifting through all these books, here’s the first bit:
The latest numbers from Bowker are extraordinary: In 2002 there were 215,000 books published in the USA, and a further 32,693 print-on-demand title (short-runs, self-published etc).
In 2008, traditional publishers put out 275,000 books; but there [...]
Ever since Book Oven shifted focus in November 2009 to Bite-Size Edits, I have been wanting to write about one of the major reasons for the shift: my realization that:
a) the world needs an open book-publishing platform
b) rather than building from scratch at Book Oven, we should have started with Wordpress, and built atop it.
I [...]
When I first started closely following the big changes in the publishing industry, James Bridle’s blog BookTwo was one of my first stops. And since then I’ve continued to watch with great appreciation as James has pushed and poked at “publishing.” The passion that drives his endeavours – passion for books, for words, for writing, [...]
We’re starting a new feature here on Book Oven, a Friday interview series, every two weeks. We’ll be talking to people who are doing interesting things in the bookish space. Our first interviewee is Liza Daly, of ThreePress Consulting, and the woman who knows all about ePub. Liza, along with Keith Fahlgren, recently launched the [...]
Marion Maneker, columnist at The Big Money, responds to Penguin CEO John Makinson’s WSJ OpEd. He makes the point more clearly than I’ve yet seen it that the book industry suffers from “oversupply and too much risk.” It’s not digital per se that is the real problem; but digital just makes it easier for others [...]
There was a big dustup between Macmillan and Amazon over ebook pricing this weekend. Here is Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s take. And Amazon’s announcement that they were backing down. And Charlie Stross’ great outsider’s view.
Whoever won, ebook pricing is a hot, tough topic. I’ll guess this chess match isn’t over yet, so we’ll [...]
My hypothesis is that DRM is bad for the publishing business, and hence the publishing business should ditch DRM for that reason. The people who are actually studying the impacts of DRM vs no-DRM – O’Reilly and Brian O’Leary leading the charge – seem to suggest that hypothesis is correct. For now, anyway. My read [...]
CBC Radio show Spark, hosted by the lovely Nora Young, has an interesting segment with indie game designer Cliff Harris, who asked “pirates” why they were pirating his games.
One of the top answers is: “Because of Digital Rights Management…”
It’s not scientific by any means, but I hope Brian O’Leary & others who *are* doing scientific [...]
