On his blog the other day, Eoin Purcell brought up an interesting point about how electronic books are changing the nature of the book market. In the old print market, bookstores could only present a limited number of titles so they concentrated mainly on new releases plus a very small selection of publisher backlists. Of course, providing full access to the “long tail” of all titles was the foundation of Amazon’s business model, but even then it was limited to titles that were available in print. But with e-books, there’s no reason any title should go out of...

That's the title of an article in the Irish Publishing News today.  Here's a snippet: Adrian White, bookseller and author, discusses why he’s pricing his novel at $9.99 in digital form. Pricing my ebook at $9.99? Am I crazy? Maybe so, but here’s why:I have three novels published as ebooks. Two have been published previously by Penguin Books but the third is published exclusively as an ebook. When I came to set the prices, I took the opportunity to try out the three different price points of €2.99, $4.99 and $9.99. I’m well aware of the power of $0.99 as an attention-grabbing...

In what is a fascinating piece for a number of reasons, The Telegraph reports on Bloomsbury’s successes in selling ebooks. I’m struck most forcefully by three things: Richard Charkin is as refreshingly open, honest and forthright as ever, which is good to see. We still miss his blog though. Bloomsbury have been playing the game pretty well on the library front and their partnership with Exact Editions seems to be yielding dividends. Charkin highlights the speed at which older readers are taking up ebooks. I’m not terribly surprised by this, but it is interesting, considering they remain...

An interesting piece on the business of self-publishing. I was struck in particular by this section pointing to the weakness of content producers in the self-publishing plane. That said, this strikes me as some kind of preferential treatment by booksellers and ultimately a bad decision by B&N, but perhaps there is some logical reason for it: This is not to say steering clear of the big publishers doesn’t cause complications. So far, Folsom has not been able to sell the foreign rights to her work, meaning right now she can only market her books...

Fascinating throughout but this passage is striking both because it highlights the remaining defence of publishing and because if it is believed by publishers, it heralds the demise of publishing as we know it. Getting ‘its internal dynamics’ right means gutting the publisher as it stands and forever changing the way the industry works: Publishing is neither printing nor distribution. It is neither paper nor e-ink. It is the creation and support of content, and the delivery of content in whatever ways are both appreciated by readers and profitable. At the moment, the industry is being...

For some time there has been a funny dichotomy in the publishing industry worldwide. On the one hand publishers have decried the growing influence of powerful tech companies from outside the industry. Google, Amazon, Apple all fall into that category (Amazon aside from being an impressive online retailer is also an amazing tech company). They are feared and despised both as huge outside firms with enormous capabilities and cash compared with publishers and also as companies driving the industry in a direction it wasn’t keen on going. On the other hand, various parts of the industry...

There’s A Problem I’ve written before about how small markets, both English language ones like Ireland and other territories with major markets in similar languages, face challenges when it comes to ebooks: So we have large publishers seeing sales internationally that they can EASILY service at little marginal cost. Acquiring the right to sell to those markets is a sensible strategy that hedges against future global digital sales while delivering real if small sales now. But the impact on smaller markets is large Take for example Ireland (I could as easily choose the English language markets in Spain, Slovenia or San Marino), where ebook...

Last year I chose some folks who I though had made 2009 interesting in publishing terms and I believed would do the same in 2010. I think I was broadly right about them. You can see the 2009 list here. For 2010 I’m doing the same. Richard Nash ~ The Risk Taker Nash is moving ahead with Cursor a new type of publishing company based on communities, authors, shorter contracts and generally many of the ideas that have been floating around books for a few years now. He’s fiery, inspiring and willing to take a gamble (and be wrong...

I’ve seen a lot of comment about Amazon’s offer of 4 weeks free Nielsen data to writers through their Author Central product. Some of it is fair and some of it is unfair. I think it’s fair to say that authors will like this, that publishers should really have been making access to sales data more freely available to authors anyway and that in general access to the data will be both useful and enlightening to some authors. I think it’s unfair to say that not allowing access to Nielsen data showed how foolish/badly-run/outdated the industry was. Most of the time I’d...

It’s been an incredibly busy few months for me in lots of ways. But I’ve also managed to get a few things shipped as Seth Godin might put it. So I thought I’d write a few posts about them. One of the things I’ve managed to get done is submitting all five of The Irish Story‘s first set of ebooks into the iTunes App store. Some of them (Rebellion, Famine and Easter Rising) are already live and available. The final two (Civil War and Independence) will go live soon. Since I finished at Mercier Press and decided to create The Irish Story, Apps and ebooks were always my focus,...

From Irish Publishing News. More info in the article. Stephen Boylan, Books Purchasing Manager at Easons with responsibility for ebooks has confirmed that Easons has signed Agency contracts with Hachette and HarperCollins. Both publishers have also changed from wholesale to agency terms for ebooks in the UK, as have Canongate, Penguin and Simon & Schuster. The new agreements mean that Easons, ‘currently have a mix of agency and wholesale pricing on their ebook site,’ according to Boylan....

In the last few days several stories have reminded me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask all publishers. I think it is a question that’s especially vital for small and medium publishers. What’s more it’s one that acts as a good acid test of your digital strategy and where your thinking is on the future direction of publishing. And the question is: Who Is Your Digital Publisher? What were the stories? We lets start with the news that Taschen announced that they have appointed a digital publisher move along a little to the news that Penguin’s new digital publisher is a former...