At the intersection of publishing, technology, and marketing.

Poems by Heart from Penguin Classics – Poetry in Your Pocket

Poems by Heart - Poem Home Screen

A secret to please keep quiet: I am not just a crass marketer or cold-eyed analyzer of publishing strategy. I am those things, or like to think I am anyway. But, truly and firstly, I love books and reading. (Shhhh…might ruin my rep.) So, this is a post written with the love of reading at [...]

Some Thoughts on Amazon’s Acquisition of GoodReads

GoodReads + Amazon

Our mentality here is to first do no harm, and make sure that if we’re going to do integrations, users genuinely find it to be a big benefit. — Russ Grandinetti, Amazon VP of Kindle Content (via PaidContent) I’ve been asked by several people what I think about Amazon’s acquisition of GoodReads. It’s funny because [...]

Amazon is Many Things, Including a Publicly-Traded Company

AAPL vs. AMAZ Share Price - Trailing 12 mos.
Graph © Google Finance

Most publishing folks I know always figured that light at the tunnel was probably a train. Now I believe we know it. Not just by their actions but by what they’ll probably be forced to do in the future. A recent piece by Fortune’s Apple-watcher Philip Elmer-Dewitt caught my eye, at first for its wonderful [...]

Platform Lock-In and Consumer eBook Prices

Amazon and Nook Logos

There has recently been a great deal of speculation and study as to what is happening – and what will happen – to eBook prices in a post DOJ settlement world. I must admit up front that I, like many, don’t know, though I am following along and am as curious as the next publishing [...]

Publisher Strategies and Devastating Opportunity Costs

Random House Author Portal

I was never much of an economics student. In truth, I was pretty bad. I did, however, grasp the idea of opportunity cost. The first sentence of Wikipedia’s definition sums it up wonderfully for me: Opportunity cost is the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the next best alternative forgone [...]