You've no doubt read about the big Amazon rank kerfluffle last week, put in the public eye by the Twitter tag: #amazonfail. A huge number of sexually-themed and lesbian/gay/bisexual books got categorized as "adult", and hence deranked, removed from best seller lists, and buried in Amazon's search results....

Can we all agree that the web will increase in importance as the place where people find things, find out about things, talk about things, and then buy them? If you need convincing on this point, take a look at four of the universe's most successful web sites: Google,...

The real challenge for the book business is a simple, difficult fact: people are reading fewer print books, and this trend will continue.

By most standards I am an relatively avid reader, and I always have been. I finish probably 25-35 books a year. But I can see in myself...

Wealth ought to come from the creation of value. That is, by designing and selling a better shovel, you make it easier for farmers to dig irrigation trenches which increases their yield. With your shovel, their output goes from 100 to 200 units a year, and so you, as shovel-maker...

With all the talk of newspapers shutting down, I wonder if we might flip the traditional interpretation:

Maybe the problem is not so much online news sources killing off business for print newspapers; maybe the problem is the continued existence of print newspapers is stifling innovation in the...

To get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions.

Book publishing has many conundrums to solve in the coming decade, and not a week goes by without a long, thoughtful article in some major magazine about the impending collapse of the industry and its...

As the death watch continues for the publishing business and perhaps even the book itself, a group of writers, technologists, publishers, agents, designers, booksellers, and social architects convened in London for BookCamp, a one-day thinking session (bookish experimentation) about what the future of the written word might be.

The Importance of Good Book Design

I've had a few discussions recently with bookmakers, designers, and typesetters about the "importance of good book design." There is a particular philosophical position that goes something like this: good book design is to some degree hidden. When you pick up a book and...

Apparently, things aren't so great in the business of unlimited supply of niche goods. Writes Patrick Foster in the UK TimesOnline:

"The internet was supposed to bring vast choice for customers, access to obscure and forgotten products -- and a fortune for sellers who focused on niche markets.

But...

Question: What would happen if, tomorrow, every publisher, and every book store, went out of business? What would you do?

The Big Stores

About fifteen years ago I walked into my first of the new breed of big book stores, Chapters in Toronto. I thought to myself: how can the...

I'm a hybrid reader, and I'll bet you probably are too. You are a member of the digital world, but you grew up reading books (you know, pages, print, that sort of thing), and you love the object almost as much as the stuff in them. But you like digital,...

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article suggesting academics should blog, and it generated some intense debate and discussion, both on Huffington Post, and on my own weblog. I had nine points, which you can read, but the first two points were, er, indelicate critiques of academic...

40,000-a-day. That's how many e-books are getting downloaded through Stanza, the simple e-book platform for the iPhone/iPod. I've got 35 of them sitting on my iPod. All of them free, public domain or creative commons, and DRM-free.

40,000-a-day. If you are a publisher, think long and...

I just came into possession of an iPod Touch, which is more or less the iPhone without the phone part (my friend Matt got an iPhone, so I inherited his Touch). I got the little gadget the night before a trip to San Francisco, and I loaded it up...

I've gone back to school; or at least, I'm taking one Master's-level course in Media Theory at Concordia University. So I've been reading a fair bit of academic writing. I've come to the conclusion that all academics should blog. Here's why:

1. You need to improve your writing
...

Among book lovers, there continues to be an prevalent negative feeling about electronic books, or ebooks. The reaction, one I myself have experienced, goes something like this: I enjoy reading books, I enjoy the feel and the tactile feedback, touch, smell, look, books can be marked up and carried around,...

The modern publishing business has been in existence since about 1800, but things are not looking so rosy in the ink-stained world. The publishing business is scared: if stagnating book sales and the creeping digital shakeup were not enough, the market meltdown has many tightening their belts...

There's been much teeth gnashing and lamenting over the impending collapse of the publishing business. See, for instance, the exhaustive New York Magazine article titled "The End", with the lead: "The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after." Readers are reading less (supposedly)...

Martin Heidegger's 1954 piece, The Question Concerning Technology transformed the way I look at technology (it's really dense). I read it in 1995, a decade before I got implicated in the web, and 40 years after it was published. When I first started writing on the web in 2004,...

All sorts of institutions are in big trouble because of the internet, and they're scared as hell. Newspapers can't figure out how they'll keep making money; the music business is terrified that its business model is evaporating. Britannica has faded to irrelevance for anyone with an internet connection. I think...