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Three Valuable Lessons from Forbes’ Digital Shift

By On July 28, 2011 · Leave a Comment · In Publishing

“Editorial control” is a four-letter word in my book. It’s a legacy of the pre-participatory era, and journalists, editors, authors, etc. who fight to maintain it, or the illusion of it, are spitting into the wind that should be filling their sails. Credibility is more important than control, and that comes from your community.

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It’s the CONTENT, Stupid! (And the Community.)

By On July 25, 2011 · 2 Comments · In Publishing

While Wall Street and technology pundits continue to devalue those who create and curate content professionally in favor of dumb pipes, content aggregators, and social media pyramid schemes, the fact is, at the end of the day, it all starts with good content. Without it, the digital business is a cork floating on the publishing stream, and the new shiny devices are little more than electronic bricks sinking to the bottom at varying rates of speed.

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Dumb Pipes, Devaluing Content: It’s All About Context

By On June 15, 2011 · 2 Comments · In Publishing

In backing down, I suspect Jobs saw the HTML5 on the wall and realized he was fighting a rare losing battle, playing hardball with major content producers whose early, enthusiastic and unabated promotion of the iPad — as inherently a consumption device as has ever been conceived — helped demonstrate its value to consumers. It was, theoretically, a mutually beneficial relationship until his reach finally exceeded his grasp.

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Where’s My Penguin Football Jersey?

By On May 31, 2011 · 2 Comments · In Marketing

The reality is, once the eBook market shakes out in the next year or two and becomes more efficient, the publishing industry will still be the dominant supplier of books people actually pay for. Will the players change? Maybe, maybe not. Will the business model have to change? (drink!) Sure, for some publishers. Same for agents and authors, too.

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Why Don’t More Authors and Publishers “Get” Libraries?

By On May 25, 2011 · 5 Comments · In Publishing

The public library is one of the fundamental pillars of our peculiar flavor of democracy, and yet, recent events in both political and publishing circles suggest that our commitment to them is wavering. And there’s certainly no shortage of opinions about their place in the “digital future,” some optimistic, but most some ignorant variation on “Who needs libraries when we have Kindles, Netflix and Wikipedia?”

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