For 11 years as CEO of HarperCollins, Jane Friedman was known as the most consistently optimistic voice in the book business. So it’s no surprise that her entrepreneurial venture, Open Road Integrated Media, has her sounding just as bullish about digital publishing. “What came before was fine,” Friedman said during the opening session Tuesday morning. “What is coming now is going to be spectacular.” Friedman shared the stage with Cathie Black, president of Heart Magazines, as the two veteran media executives detailed how the electronic age is reshaping their businesses. Here, in brief, the future according to Jane: Five year plan…by 2015,...

Are ad dollars the future of ebooks? The question sparked debate Tuesday during a session moderated by TeleRead’s own Paul Biba. Opinions differed widely among the four-person panel and members of the audience, who questioned whether advertisers would want to sponsor titles and why readers would put up with having commercial messages inserted into books. Panelists talked about institutional hurdles, including book publishers’ lack of experience in dealing with advertisers. But panelist Susan Danziger, founder and CEO of DailyLit, which caters to time-strapped readers who want books delivered to them digitally in chunks, said that her customers would rather get sponsored content...

Sourcebooks founder and publisher Dominique Raccah thinks of herself as running two companies: a book publishing house and a mixed media company. And so should every other publisher, Raccah told the audience during a workshop at TOC Tuesday. The point, she said, is to think in terms of the content you have—or, “what are you expert at”—and how that expertise can be packaged and sold in different forms and at different price points. At Sourcebooks, that includes taking its popular baby naming title and repurposing the information as a high-end $19.95 gift book and a $4.99 iPhone app. That...

2001 ebook devices, 3 to 7 million in sales, Industry Standard. Kindle estimated sold about 2 million total. What went wrong: Not enough books available. Expensive and tepid publisher involvement. Prices were too high High prices, too few titles, no one wants to invest in a device. Usage patterns : Since they won’t buy a device, let’s put it on stuff they do use. PCs, PDA’s. Not enough periodicals—didn’t want to make compromises on quality, advertising doesn’t work the same, competition from free websites. Marketing. The challenge: For consumers books aren’t broken.The most successful free publisher online: is Yahoo. Yahoo publisher the equivalent of...

When it comes to social media, quantity counts, but quality counts a lot more. That’s the word from two popular workshops held during day one at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. Twitter—the smart, the ineffective and the annoying ways publishers use it—was the focus of a session run by O’Reilly associate publisher Mike Hendrickson. Speaking to a standing room only crowd, he urged publishers not to fixate on numbers, but to focus on attracting a diverse group of engaged, high-quality followers. How? By using Twitter not just to broadcast information, but to spark a conversation. And by making sure what they’re...

Hyperventilating stories and blog posts are trumpeting the (super, super exciting!) news that Oprah is now on Twitter. After just a day or so, she is up to at least  263,917 followers, well on her way to equaling President Obama’s 738,208. But one spoilsport (old media, wouldn’t you know it?)  included this caution from marketing strategist Andrew Davis: “The mega-celebrity marketing machine that is Oprah seems like the next level of adoption.” After the quote, the New York Times goes on: Mr. Davis said...

Could the Kindle and similar e-readers revive interest in the American short story? That's the question raised in a  New York Times item, by A.O. Scott. "The new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity, a genuine advantage for reading off a screen," Scott writes. "The blog post and the tweet may be ephemeral rather than lapidary, but the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith. And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the...