Random House and Its Very Own Print-on-demand Web Site
Random House has announced that it will be creating a Web site to market selected titles as print on demand. This has come under criticism in a number of quarters, not because POD is not fully...
View ArticleThe competition for The NY Times Sunday Book Review
In a publishing listserv discussion, triggered by the planned shutdown of Washington Post’s BookWorld, I contributed to a discussion about how the franchise in The New York Times Sunday Book Review...
View ArticleDecline and Fall
Empires, by definition, begin their decline at their peak. Today Amazon bestrides the publishing world like Caesar, and it may seem far-fetched to think of this company slipping from its dominant...
View ArticlePurchase on Demand: The New POD
The virtues of print on demand (aka POD) are well known. Publishers no longer have to store books in warehouses, waiting for an order to come in. Instead, systems are set up that take advantage of...
View ArticleThreadless and Collaborative Publishing
On the surface, one wouldn’t immediately think of the t-shirt as a great model for web collaboration and community, often referred to, either fondly or derisively, as Web 2.0. But Threadless has...
View ArticleWhat Were Once Devices Are Now Habits
A few days ago I was riding home on my Xootr push scooter—yes, it’s a tough commute—when an old Ford Falcon pulled up next to me at the light. I noticed the undercarriage splotched with rust, the tires...
View ArticleAt the apex
I’ve been reading a couple of things lately that could restore, if you were in need of such a thing, your faith in print, and in the vitality of scholarship and publishing in the digital age. The...
View ArticleAn Inconvenient Truth about Scholarly Publishing
On June 20 of 2009, I gave what I consider my most significant speech to date, at the Association of American University Presses’ annual meeting, entitled “Scholarly Publishing in the New Era of...
View ArticleOn the technology and learning trail
When Paul Baran conjured out of the haze of sunny Santa Monica summer afternoons the concept of “distributed communications”—later called packet switching—did he imagine that his theory, born out of...
View ArticlePeer Review in the Digital Age
How relevant is the peer review process in the digital age? In our fast-paced world of instant Twitter, innumerable and often-illuminating blogs, comprehensive wikis, and insightful electronic...
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