INDEX // mb Ideas on Publishing Books in Canada (and other attempts to write good)

Archive for August 2008

Territorial Rights Achilles Heel Even For Projects That “Get It”

In last month’s Wired magazine, Frank Rose touted the first web series to get major funding from Hollywood. $2 million  dollars later the site for Gemini Divsion launched today.
My question — why are they blocking Canadian views? Who is going to buy Canadian rights and mirror the friggin thing. Ridiculous.

Calling Martin Levin — Globe and Mail Books Section Needs New Blood

When I saw Amazon.ca’s usual weekly full page ad in the Globe and Mail buried in the Arts section on Saturday it took me a second to realize the entire book section was missing. It turns out news of the book section’s hiatus passed me by (thanks RJO). The experience of readers chronicled at Book [...]

Scoble Not The Only One Affected by Twitter Cap

Back in June Twitter’s fail whale was getting more lift than a Beverly Hills house wife. At the same time the Twitter spammers were coming out of the wood work. I called for a follow cap of 5000 people — a similar number to the Facebook friends one user could have at the time. I [...]

(Back to) The School of Life: Author Charges to Teach ‘Class’

A Reuters story from August 3 popped up in the paper today. Apparently author Alain de Botton is charging $400 per head for the general public to attend ‘classes’ on topics he has authored books about. The arrangement is part of a new effort by artists and writers in Bloomsbury called the ‘School of Life‘.
If [...]

Media M&A: A Primer for Book Publishers

Brian O’Leary, founder of Magellan Media Consulting, gave a talk at this year’s Book Expo America for book publishers looking to acquire internet companies. He made a comment that particularly rang true for me about keeping an open mind regarding the accounting when looking at a such a company. I once had a very difficult [...]

Watchmen Visual Audio Book

‘Who is watching the watchmen?’ is seemingly a more important question now than when Alan Moore and David Gibbons did The Watchmen graphic novel back in the late 80s. A movie is on the way. The book is stacked at Chapters. Now iTunes is featuring a ‘motion comic’ of the story for download. It is [...]

eBook Market Conditions in Japan

I heard the other day that part-time iPhone developers are making a not insignificant killing as companies rush to get on the iPhone bandwagon.
There has been talk in publishing circles about publisher’s responsibilities re: iPhone development.
It is nice to see Lonely Planet, Frommers, and HarperCollins rise to the occasion and fill the pockets of the [...]

Paper Just the Beginning: Indigo Books

For those RSS subscribers out there, Indigo Books has responded to my post about their green policy. Bottom line: they are doing more behind the scenes then they are advertising.

Protect My Business Model: UK Publishers Set e-Book Prices

I just read a post over at the Bookseller about Uk publisher’s plans to enter the ebook market. The plan seems to be to pursue parity pricing with existing print editions. Here is a representative response…
Genevieve Shore, global digital director at Penguin, also argued for parity pricing because of the costs involved with producing e-books. [...]

Indigo Books Green Strategy: Ask Publishers to Do What They Already Said They Would Do

I was in a downtown Indigo Books location tonight and was confronted with a standee and pamphlets announcing their new green policy. I thought ‘bravo’. The standee pointed to www.chapters.indigo.ca/paper for more info. Looking over what is written on the site, it appears to be far less ambitious than I hoped. Where is a statement [...]

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