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Tag: Publishing

Published February 8, 2010

Clutching at Straws

Some time back in September 2009, The Casual Optimist turned one-year-old. I didn’t actually notice until later — I had other things going on at the time — but I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, especially since Joe Sullivan decided to put The Book Design Review on hiatus.

Compiling The Casual Optimist is an amazing experience. I learn something new every day and I meet some incredibly talented, smart people because of the blog. But for better, or worse, The Casual Optimist hasn’t exactly grown as I imagined it would and I often wonder if I spend to much time on the wrong things in one way or another.

The posts about the book trade — the posts that take longest to write — seem to generate the least interest (at least in terms of traffic and comments). The most popular posts by-the-numbers are the interview with designer David Pearson (which I totally get by the way!) and the list of inspirational vintage cover sites. It makes me curious who is visiting and why.

With this in mind, I thought I would hold a straw poll to find out what you want to see more of here. I promise there is no ulterior motive — this is not about boosting traffic, selling ads, or anything sinister — I really am just curious. And I want to make the site better as we move on to Year Two.

So please take a look at the poll if you have a minute (FYI: you can check more than one answer and submit the form more than once). Or, if the poll doesn’t really work for you, leave me a comment, ping me on Twitter (or Facebook), or drop me a line by email if it makes more sense. I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks. :-)

6 Comments
Published February 5, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Book wonks are still abuzz about the whole Amazon vs. Macmillan thing (see here previously) — who won, who didn’t, WTF?, and Rupert Murdoch’s shit-stirring — but I’m reliably informed by someone whose job is looking cool at the photocopier* that it is a really boring topic of conversation, so I’m going to move on…

The AIGA Design Archives — including the wonderful 50 Books/50 Covers — has been redesigned by Second Story, mercifully moving it away from its previous Flash interface so we can all link to it properly when we talk about it (pictured above: Brooklyn Modern designed by Projects Projects)

Elements of an Incendiary Blog Post — Painfully on the money (via Kottke):

This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.

This sentence claims that there are many people who do not agree with the thesis of the blog post as expressed in the previous sentence. This sentence speculates as to the mental and ethical character of the people mentioned in the previous sentence. This sentence contains a link to the most egregiously ill-argued, intemperate, hateful and ridiculous example of such people the author could find.

Coverspy — “publishing nerds hit the subways, streets, parks & bars to find out what New Yorkers are reading…” A cover-oriented variation on Toronto’s Seen Reading (via SwissMiss).

Context and Connections — A great interview with illustrator, graphic designer and writer Frank Chimero:

There’s value to… knowing what your peers are working on, but it’s not a day-to-day concern. You’d probably get further checking a food blog every day, because it triangulates your interests and you’ll naturally come towards it wanting to make connections to what you’re doing and what you already know. Sure, you want your knowledge of the field to be deep, but it’s optimal to have your interests wide and varied. It’s makes your consumption more nourishing too, because all of a sudden you get context!

And finally…

Agent of Chaos — Bonkers and awesome, Werner Herzog (not really) reads Curious George:

(No really, it’s not Werner Herzog).

* Nic: I love you man.

3 Comments
Published February 3, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

A Wall in Palestine — more quiet mastery from Henry Sene Yee who excels in projects that require maximum discretion and minimal commentary. Like his cover design for Columbine,  A Wall in Palestine is notable for what it leaves out. An early contender for cover the year. You heard it here first.

Making the World Fun to Look At — The Cleveland Plain Dealer has (what is believed to be) the first interview with Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes,  since 1989:

I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.

Amen.

Seven Things Publishers Need to Remember — A nice post by Kobo Books exec (and compulsive list maker) Michael Tamblyn on e-books and pricing:

A reader should never have to worry about “leaving books behind” or “losing their library”. If you can’t download it and move it somewhere else, it’s worth less. Seriously. They’re books, not Atari 2600 video game cartridges.

(But I’m waiting for the “7 Things E-tailers Need to Remember” post Michael. When’s that coming? You can post here if you want)

The Lost 1970 Man Booker Prize — Commemorating novels missed out because of rule changes in 1971. Bonkers. But kind of great.

Problem Solver — Ian Shimkoviak of The Book Designers interviews the legendary Carin Goldberg for their new blog CoveredUp:

I’m not a sentimentalist. The e-book is inevitable. And they make sense. The publishing industry can’t sustain the old/current model for making/selling books. It’s wasteful and unsustainable. They have to embrace change. Good content will continue to be created whether it’s represented on paper or on a screen.  And there will always be a market, albeit small, for beautiful picture books. The role of the graphic designer is shrinking but it’s in our court to get involved in the next wave of imagery and ideas.

And finally…

Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City (which I liked, but wanted to like more), interviewed on KCRW’s Bookworm (via the incroyable Largehearted Boy):

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Published February 2, 2010

Too Many Books

“We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.”

“Too many books” is one old complaint. Historian Adrien Baillet wrote that in 1685. Plummeting book prices is another…

An interesting segment about books on NPR’s On The Media from late November 2009:

(Too bad about the dreadful Moxy Fruvous song)

The transcript is here.

(via Lined & Unlined)

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Published February 1, 2010

Obligatory Apple/Amazon Post

It somehow seems terribly appropriate that I spent the week Apple unveiled the iPad battling with problems with my own PC laptop (*sigh*) and missed a lot of the excitement.

Even at the best of times, I am usually at least a day behind the news cycle, and so not for the first time, I thought I’d write a post as a way to get myself up to speed over the weekend. But, just when I started to think I had a handle on it all, I got sideswiped by the not unrelated kerfuffle between Macmillan and Amazon… (*sigh*)

Needless to say, things are happening at a frightening pace and so this post will probably be out of date even before it is live. It should also go without saying — although I’d better say it anyway — that any opinions expressed here are my own, not those of my employer…

So, as I was saying, Apple launched the iPad and iBooks store.

Many in the tech crowd — who were apparently expecting Jesus 2.0 — were, unsurprisingly, a little disappointed by the name and the lack of features such as multitasking, Flash, and a camera.

But, even if you don’t accept that disappointment is the condition of our age, the loquacious Stephen Fry pointed out that many the same critics were also underwhelmed by the iPhone and look how that turned out:

[E]ven if they couldn’t see that three billion apps would be downloaded in two years… could they not see that this device was gorgeous, beautifully made, very powerful and capable of development into something extraordinary? I see those qualities in the iPad. Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want now and one that will not be matched this year by any company.

Fry believes (and rightly I think) that the big impact of iPad will be on the media and the way we consume it:

[I]t is a whole new kind of device. And it will change so much. Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic textbooks, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed.

Ivor Tossell makes a similar point in today’s The Globe and Mail. According to Tossell, the iPad will essentially be used to “piss away time on the Internet”:

[S]o now we have a tablet that’s perfect for the couch, and the restaurant table, and the party, and the lecture hall; for reading in the bathroom, for floating in space, and possibly for using in the space-bathroom. Who knows – the future is grand… The question, in the end, isn’t whether you want to spend hundreds of dollars on a new tablet computer. It’s about whether you really want the Internet lying around the house like that.

Of course, this is not news to book folk. I think we have always seen e-readers as a new way to read in the bath.

Nevertheless, the iPad’s sleek design, intuitive interface, and startling low starting price of $499 USD, make it welcome alternative to Amazon’s somewhat ‘fugly’ Kindle. Mashable (although they were not alone) were quick to give reasons why the Kindle is Dead (while others have been equally quick explain why it isn’t).

And then there is the iBooks store. Not only does it support e-Pub, but most of major publishing houses — Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette (although notably NOT Random House) — have signed up. As Sarah Weiman noted at Daily Finance :

If it wasn’t clear that iPad and iBooks are two shots across the bow of Amazon’s…. Kindle e-reader, Jobs’s left-handed compliments drove the point home: “Amazon has done a great job of pioneering this….We’re going to stand on their shoulders”

It has, of course, been something of an open, if largely misunderstood, secret that publishers are not happy with Amazon pressuring them on prices, discounts, and marketing dollars (although I’m not quite sure anyone expected Steve Jobs to say it aloud) and so it is not surprising that publishers are embracing the iPad. But, with apps for the kindle, better terms for self-published authors, and persistently loud (if vague) announcements about sales, Amazon had clearly been preparing for this moment for some time.

It was still a shock however, when after a disagreement of pricing and terms, Amazon (briefly) upped the stakes even further by withdrawing both print and digital titles published by Macmillan from their site. That Macmillan was coincidentally one of the publishers signed up for iBooks was not lost on people.

As Cory Doctorow notes at BoingBoing, Macmillan were not blameless, but Amazon — perhaps fearing a PR disaster after Macmillan CEO John Sargent went public — quickly capitulated (albeit grudgingly and, as Fast Company and Moby Lives noted, somewhat disingenuously) and things are beginning to quieten down, at least for now.

Others — notably Andrew Wheeler (a braver soul than me), the indefatigable Sarah Weinman, and author John Scalzi (another brave soul), not to mention the mainstream media et al — have done a far better job of unpacking this farrago than I could, especially since I have to be somewhat guarded in what I say.  I’m just going to end by saying that this fight was probably inevitable — predictable even — but, if nothing else, this is surely a sign of things to come…

Update:

For more of the industry nitty-gritty and some (estimated) numbers around the Amazon-Macmillan disagreement, Mike Shatzkin’s post on the subject is also worth reading…

Update 2:

Two things:

One, if I was going to rewrite the part of this post about Amazon (heaven help me), I would  say — and say early — that despite all of the complaints about Amazon, they are good at selling stuff. Publishers like Amazon’s sales figures and relatively low return rates. If Amazon were just rubbish, this wouldn’t be half as complicated as it is…

Two, I wanted to post this from Bobby Solomon’s blog Kitsune Noir on the iPad:

For those who are disappointed by it, who think it’s a rehash of the iPhone, I honestly feel bad for you. I know it doesn’t cook you toast, and I know you wanted it to have lasers, but you’re completely overlooking the fact that no one else on Earth could make a device anything like this. Please prove me wrong, I would love to see some competition on this device…  P.S. They could call it the iDouche for all I care, if it’s amazing who gives a rip?

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Published January 27, 2010

Under the Covers: Reviewing the Covers of 2009

Tonight is the BPPA‘s annual review of the best and worst book covers of the year.

Sadly Alan Jones, Senior Designer at HarperCollins Canada, had to drop out at the last minute and is being replaced by Boy Wonder David A. Gee (interviewed here) and umm… me. No, I’m not quite sure what they were thinking either (about asking me — David is obviously a great choice)…

The other panellists are freelance designer Ingrid Paulson (also interviewed here), Terri Nimmo Senior Designer at Random House Canada, and Steven Beattie Review Editor at The Quill & Quire.

Panel moderator David Ward of McClelland & Stewart has promised me Jaffa Cakes.

The event is 6:30-8:30 pm at The Arts and Letters Club (3rd Floor) in Toronto. It’s free for BPPA Members, $20.00 for non-members apparently.

There’s more information on the BPPA’s event page.

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Published January 27, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

The Backwards Novel Seen Backwards by Tom Gauld.

I also love Tom’s Lost Fairy Tales for a promotional concertina booklet made by his agent Heart (surely there’s a full length book to be had here?).

Ways of Reading from A Working Library:

Every book alights a path to other books. Follow these paths as far as you can.

Lovely.

Back to Basics — Booktwo.org‘s James Bridle on the Apple tablet (what else?):

I’ve spent several years urging publishers to get on board with new technologies and try new things, but equally I hope there’s space for a lot of publishers to get back to concentrating on what they do best: acquiring, editing, producing and publishing books… [W]e should probably stop scrambling to get on the latest bandwagon (vanilla Books-as-Apps, I’m looking at you), and concentrate on the basics: ebook production, metadata, integrated marketing, quality and consideration. There is a lot to be done, but this or that device will never be the be-all-and-end-all of the future of publishing.

I think James has a point. But honestly, no one I know (and that is an admittedly limited sample) believes “this-or-that device” will magically “save” publishing. Surely it is only bloggers in need of straw men and ‘journalists’ paid to hyperventilate who say that kind of shit?

Moving (swiftly) on…

Modern Myths — Will Self on H. G. Well’s The War of the Worlds in The Times:

The War of the Worlds is one of those books that demonstrates our culture’s surprising ability to continue the manufacture of myth. I say surprising, because one would think, with all the technological reproducibility of art now at our disposal — from raw print, to film, to digitisation — that there would be no room left for that hazy instability within which myth thrives.

(Pictured above: The NYRB edition of The War of the Worlds with illustrations by Edward Gorey)

And finally, completely unrelated to books…

Dear Coffee I Love You… Yes, yes, I do. (Pictured above: What I’d Rather Be Doing)

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Published January 24, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Slim pickings in a week in which book nerds obsessed about the implications of the rumoured Apple tablet (and PS – if anyone else describes it as the fucking ‘unicorn’ it’s clobberin’ time…), while in a completely unrelated move (snarf!), Amazon announced it was going to allow iPhone style apps to be uploaded and sold on the Kindle (begging the question when does the Kindle become the Pontiac Aztek?) and — faster than you can say bait and switch — they offered self-published authors improved royalties.

But, anyway, here’s more fun stuff for your weekend pleasure…

What To Leave Out? — I Love Typography‘s favourite fonts of 2009, including the lovely Phaeton and Biographer (pictured above), as well as Jos ‘exljbris’ Buivenga’s  Calluna.

The big graphic novels of 2010 according to Publishers Weekly.

And finally… I’ve been meaning to link to this for ages, at least in part so I could post Erik Mohr‘s cover for Monstrous Affections by David Nickle…

Horror Stories — Waaaaay back in November The National Post chatted with the publishers and authors from dark fiction specialists ChiZine Publications :

[W]e wanted to produce beautiful, well-written books. Books you wanted to pick up — and when you did, you wouldn’t be disappointed by what was inside. Essentially, books we ourselves wanted to read…

Genre fiction is notorious for having cheesy, sloppily executed covers with no sense of design or what is attractive to potential book buyers. We’ve been incredibly lucky that Erik has made our books look so good. And by “good” I sometimes mean “disturbing.”

Maybe what we’ve managed to do with CZP is to find a niche that wasn’t being filled…or maybe we created our own niche.

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Published January 19, 2010

Heads Will Roll

Steve Osgoode, Director of Digital Marketing and Business Development at HarperCollins Canada, pointed me (and everyone else on Twitter) to an interesting post on e-books at An American Editor by Rich Adin. It’s a nice coda to the Guy LeCharles Gonzalez post I mentioned yesterday:

No industry changes overnight, so it is certain that publishers aren’t going to change their business model tomorrow just because a handful of people demand it… But the anger of the devotees, as few as they may be in number, continues and becomes increasingly strident, with neither side willing to “hear” the other.

Adin goes on to raise some interesting points. I do, however, have problems with his argument that the internet has fostered a sense of entitlement:

The Age of the Internet has birthed a belief among some consumers that they are entitled to everything they want when they want it at a price they want to pay…  Entitlement says I have rights that are more valuable than your rights (or that you have no rights)…

There is certainly some grain of truth to this and, to be fair, Adin’s argument is more nuanced than the quotation suggests. But it is also a dangerously seductive argument for publishers who don’t want to take full responsibility for their actions.

On a basic level, blaming the consumer and/or accusing them of being uppity (or worse, criminals) is not a good business strategy. Figuring out what they will pay for is a much better idea.

Customers don’t necessarily want cheap — they want value. Sure, everyone likes cheap stuff in the short term — free is even better — and yet most people know that in the end you get what you pay for. Quality costs.

Consumers will pay for things when they believe they are worth it, and as publishers, we need to recognise we aren’t always providing real value for money. We publish too many books and (shh… whisper it) a lot of them aren’t very good. We can do better. How many books really do need to be released in hardcover a full year before they’re available as paperbacks (or e-books) for example?

I also don’t think you can ignore that consumer attitudes are being led by businesses — that publishers have been all too willing to oblige — who have an interests in devaluing creative content as much as possible. Cheap content gets people in to stores and sells devices and publishers have benefited from this in the short-term. But we need to realise that cheapening our own content is like pissing in the pool. Not cool and not a good idea — even if it feels good at the time…

That all said, I think Adin recognises that it is not a one way street. He argues that publishers and consumers need to compromise:

The ebookers have thrown down the gauntlet, the publishers need to pick it up and accept the challenge. Simply because some ebookers have decided that publishers have no role to play in the future ebook world doesn’t make it so. Publishers need to redefine themselves in 21st century terms, not rehash 20th century concepts.

This, at least, seems spot on to me…

Read the whole article.

7 Comments
Published January 18, 2010

“E” is for Experiment (Not E-books)

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Audience Development Director at F+W Media, had an interesting op-ed at Publishing Perspectives last week about e-books and e-readers:

[T]here is a lot of R&D money being poured into [e-readers] — that’s how technology companies work — and one or more of them may eventually click with consumers, but right now it’s a fledgling market and the hype surrounding it has reached irrational levels in publishing circles… There are many fundamental business issues that need to be addressed related to e-books — rights, royalties, pricing, distribution, marketing — and it’s up to publishers, agents and authors to figure them out together and not be distracted by every new shiny object the technology companies come up with.

Although clearly not a big advocate for e-readers, Guy raises a lot of the question marks that I think still hang over the devices in a fairly balanced way, and the article as a whole expresses a lot of the doubts I hear from other quietly skeptical people in publishing.

Needless to say, the whole thing is worth reading and Guy has more to say on the subject at his blog loudpoet.

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Published January 9, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Megan Wilson‘s new cover design for An Education by Lynn Barber.

Of a Certain Blockheadedness — Scott McLemee on the internet’s “gigantic plot” to get him to write for free:

The idea that new media has somehow abolished the old hierarchical structuring of the field (making everything level and equal and rhizomatic and whatnot) is only half right, at best. The hierarchies aren’t as well-marked as they used to be but they aren’t gone. Talk of an “army of amateurs” is at this point persuasive only to people who enlist without paying any attention to the fine print.

The Art of Fontana Modern Masters — Much linked to elsewhere, James Pardey (of the The Art of Penguin Science-Fiction site mentioned here) has new project on the Op-Art inspired Fontana Modern Masters book cover designs. He’s also written about the series for Eye (via Ace Jet 170 and Daily Discoveries on Design).

The New Sleekness — Ami Greko and Pablo Defendini (and other “bookish types”) try to fill a hole in publishing punditry. Having tried that myself and failed horribly, I can only wish them good luck.

Around The World with the Bodoni Family — A beautiful new 60-page book by graphic designer Teresa Monachino seen at The Creative Review. Each letter of the alphabet is printed in Bodoni to illustrate a place beginning with that letter.

Wave of Mutilation — Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder, on the films of David Lynch in the New Statesman. Yes, it is as weird and unlikely as it sounds (via 3:AM):

Try to count the instances of deformity in Lynch’s work, or of people being deformed on camera, and you’ll lose count pretty quickly…  Deformity, for Lynch, is not simply thematic: it is instrumental. In his films, what the continual, almost systematic replacement of body parts and faculties by instruments – crutches, wheelchairs, hearing aids and ever weirder apparatuses sometimes as large as rooms – produces is a whole prosthetic order, a world of which prosthesis is not just a feature, but a fundamental term, an ontological condition.

Information Wants to be Valued — Ian Grant, Managing Director of Encyclopaedia Britannica, at BookBrunch:

The new online world has given book publishers good reason to review everything that they do, from what to publish to how to run their businesses. It is a noisy call to new action and fresh efforts, but publishers are well-placed to respond. The core skills we have had for generations – imagining our users, creating shapely products that meet their needs, and identifying the transfer of value that results in a sale, are precisely the skills that make good publishing online successful and satisfying. Information does not “want to be free”; customers want to be inspired and satisfied.

And finally: It seems I’m not the only one who doesn’t take predictions about the book industry entirely serious… Laurence Hughes over at the Huffington Post:

Some time in the next decade, someone will download both The Bible and The Satanic Bible to their e-reader, triggering the Final Conflict and ushering in Armageddon and the End of Days. Expect a slight dip in book sales during the thousand-year reign of the Antichrist.

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Published January 8, 2010

Predictions

I really don’t know why smart people make predictions.

Surely one of the lessons of the last couple of years is that experts are actually very, very bad at making predictions — or rather, they are good at making predictions, just not very good at making accurate ones, which is, perhaps, even worse.

And didn’t we learn that experience doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the future?

In fact, someone even wrote a bestselling (if very irritating) book about it.

Nevertheless, it seems the smart book people — like moths to a flame — are undeterred. Here are some predictions from people in and around the industry:

Book Business Faces ‘Tectonic’ Shift: 2010 and Beyond (Part One) — Gail Roebuck (Random House), Peter Field (Penguin) and Victoria Barnsley (HarperCollins) in The Bookseller. Victoria Barnsley:

I think 50% of books will be read online by 2020. There will be far more variety for consumers across different formats with enhanced e-books for example. The business model will become much more complicated. The day when we sold only hardbacks and paperbacks will be looked backed at with wonder.

‘Decade of the people’: 2010 and Beyond (Part Two) — Tim Godfray (Booksellers Association), Michael Neil (Bertrams), Tim Coates (library campaigner), Roy Clare (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council), George Walkley (Hachette) in The Bookseller. Tim Godfray:

The big booksellers will develop online presence and independent booksellers will get increased offers of support from publishers, but as ever it will be consumer led and the winners will be the ones that please the consumer…

$64,000 question—where will the book be purchased and on which platform will it lie?

Predictions 2010: Cloudy with a Chance of Alarm — Michael Cairns, Information Media Partners and Personanondata:

[T]here have been few bright spots… during 2009, and after having taken the pulse of views on the near-term future in publishing by speaking to a number of senior publishing executives, my belief is we will not see any appreciable improvements during 2010. While some of their collective views can be attributed to ‘hedging,’ external trends support the lack of optimism whether they be reductions in education funding and library budgets or the increasing reliance on “blockbuster” authors or pricing issues.

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times — Bob Miller, president and publisher of HarperStudio:

[F]or every trend there will be a counter trend

Book Publishing 10 Years in the Future — Richard Nash, former publisher, at GalleyCat:

In 2020 we will look back on the last days of publishing and realize that it was not a surfeit of capitalism that killed it, but rather an addiction to a mishmash of Industrial Revolution practices that killed it, including a Fordist any color so long as it is black attitude to packaging the product, a Sloanist hierarchical management approach to decision making, and a GM-esque continual rearranging of divisions like deck chairs on the Titanic based on internal management preferences rather than consumer preferences.

A baker’s dozen predictions for 2010 — Mike Shatzkin, The Idea Logical Company:

By the end of 2010, the experiment with “windowing” ebooks — withholding them from release when the hardcover comes out — will end as increasing evidence persuades publishers and agents that ebook sales (at any price) spur print book sales (at any price), not cannibalize or discourage them and, furthermore, that this withholding effort does nothing to restrain Amazon’s proclivity for discounting.

2010 Predictions — Joe Wikert, general manager and publisher at O’Reilly Media:

Let’s face it. The e-future of this industry is not quick-and-dirty p-to-e conversions.  Pricing pressures and  value propositions mean these will be nothing more than revenue rounding errors for the foreseeable future.  2010 will be the year where we’ll see more investment in richer e-content products.

Ten Things You Can Comfortably Ignore in 2010 — David Worlock, publishing analyst and advisor, Thoughts from the bottom of my garden…:

Anyone who proclaims the arrival of a new age and names it web 3.0 , 4.2 or X marks the spot.  We are working within a new continuum, every technology we will use in the next 15 years has already been invented and patented, and what remains to be seen is only the way in which consumers react to which combinations of hardware/software/content to solve which problems in what contexts. And nothing is lost by experimentation.

OK, for the record, I do genuinely believe these are all smart people who should have some idea what they’re talking about. But I do think it’s important to ask the following questions:

  • Who is writing the prediction?
  • Why are they making predictions about the book industry?
  • What do they have to gain (or lose) from their predictions coming to pass?

And, remember kids, while predictions are fun, they’re really no more reliable than tea leaves…

Book business faces ‘tectonic’ shift: 2010 and beyond, part oneBook business faces ‘tectonic’ shift: 2010 and beyond, (part one)

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