Commentary and advice on marketing, mostly for publishers (traditional and brands) and writers, but sometimes from a broader perspective.
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.
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.
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?"
Of course, last week’s much hyped and completely vague announcement of Bookish, a new joint venture between three of the “Big 6? – Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin Group — caught my attention, not for its unusual (but not unprecedented) collaborative angle, but for its disappointingly unimaginative and shortsighted value proposition.
Now, with a new job serving a new community that doesn't officially (or unoffically) require my writing skills, there's an exciting light at the end of the tunnel and I'm seizing the opportunity while trying to find the right balance to ensure it's all sustainable.
Stories just as powerful and compelling as those Waiting for Superman put in the spotlight are confined to the printed page instead of being unleashed across multiple platforms for people to connect with, share with others, and inspire action.
Right now, the relative ease of digital publishing -- not yet the equivalent of blogging, but getting closer every week -- and the exceptional successes of a relative handful of authors masks the larger challenges ahead for authors and publishers alike, regardless of their business model: discoverability.