If the object of writing is to deliver to readers a text that is engaging and enlightens, or entertains them in some way or other, then the idea of maintaining a fixed form of a book needs to be reexamined. Writers will probably always want to keep control of their...

Ebooks are the fastest growing sector of the book business, by a long-shot, and there's this lingering question out there:

What is a book?

Text on pages, between covers, okay; and I think we can all agree that the electronic version of that thing is a book too,...

Here's a bit of a confession, in the world of the web that I have been exploring with great excitement since 2004: the thing that has interested me least is marketing. Blogging, podcasting, wikis, Twitter, Idenit.ca, community filtering and big online datasets, and many other things have been thrilling to...

This was going to be a short post. It's turned into a manifesto of sorts! Ah, well ...

I don't like the term "self-publishing."

Cloud-Publishing

In the emerging world of "cloud-publishing," it's meaningless, and does not reflect what's coming, what we're already seeing signs of. Cloud-publishing -- what we're doing...

Danah Boyd points to a study of Twitter usage by PearAnalytics, that concludes:

40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have "pass along value"; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news."

On July 9, Ian Shapira, staff writer for the Washington Post wrote a 1,500 word fluff piece about consultant Anne Loehr, who explains GenY to their cohabitants in the workplace. Then Gawker's Hamilton Nolan blogged the story, reprinting some of Anne Loehr quotations from the Post piece.

Ian...

A Parable of the Past

A friend of mine heard an interview on Fresh Air with Scottish director Armando Iannucci about his new film In the Loop (IMDB). He'd never heard of Iannucci, or the movie, or the TV show upon which the movie is...

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...