In an article on the Columbia Journalism Review website Ryan Chittum takes on a spate of recent tech posts “arguing that production costs (you know, minor details like advances, editors, etc.) don’t or shouldn’t factor into the end price” of an ebook. He wags his…
The New York Times’ David Streitfeld has a profile of Tulsa-based publisher Educational Development Corporation, which in February pulled its 1,800 children’s books off of Amazon. (A move discussed in a previous MobyLives report.) Randall White, EDC’s chief executive, tells the Times that “Amazon is squeezing…
Over and over in the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five of the six largest U.S. publishers the defendants are said to be obsessed with one thing: pricing. Leafing through the DOJ suit, there’s no evidence that the publishers worried that Amazon, which…
Above, two posters spotted in New York advertising May Day festivities connected to Occupy Wall Street. (The poster on top is hanging in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the other in the bathroom of a coffee shop in the East Village.) The slogan, of course, is from…
Which countries are most loyal to the printed book? R.R. Bowker’s “Global eBook Monitor” study (as summarized here by the Digital Book World blog, and in the above Bowker chart) surveyed “1,000 to 2,000 people in each of ten countries—Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan,…
Mark Twain’s famous quip about the reports of his death being greatly exaggerated can be uttered by the publishing industry with a certain satisfaction this morning, according to an Association of American Publisher‘s press release. As part of their new “Monthly Snapshot” of data surveying the industry,…
Romenesko gets new details on a regular report issued by Howard Polskin’s “one-man research firm” The Tab Farm, which charts what passengers are reading on New York’s subways. (Or at least on the R, N and W trains in mid-town Manhattan). The number of people reading…
Writing in the Financial Times, John Lanchester—the author of the novel Capital—asks why it is that so few novelists and poets tackle banking and finance: You can assemble an entire canon of the greatest English language poets from men who had lengthy professional careers in…
Last week Independent Publishers Group CEO Curt Matthews wrote a blog post titled “What Should an E-book Cost?” Like most attempts to quantify the financial costs and benefits of publishing, Matthews’ analysis got a bit lost in the numbers. But at the end of his piece…
On the occasion of a new edition of Edward Jay Epstein’s The Hollywood Economist, Publishers Weekly’s Marc Schultz spoke to Epstein on the state of the industry. What major changes have taken place since the original 2010 release of The Hollywood Economist? The main…
