LISNews: Librarian News

Commentary by publishing industry consultant Mike Shatzkin

Excerpt:

Now I swear all this is true. As everybody knows, a very serious food fight broke out between Amazon and Macmillan late Friday night. All weekend Michael Cader led the way in ferreting out additional useful information and I spent most of today (Sunday) trying to write an analytical blogpost. I got it just about finished in the early afternoon, and the bottom line to what I’d written was “Amazon will not be able to sustain this.”

I decided to hold the post until after going to see Crazy Heart this afternoon and, when I came home, Amazon had already folded. But I had written a post that provided a lot of useful information, even if events had stolen my punchline.

So I’m giving it the once-over to edit it for the reality that Amazon has already announced that they will not continue to boycott Macmillan books.

Blog post from the Seattle PI-Online about the frequent pairing of cats and books.

Shown is Litchfield (IL) Carnegie Public Library Director Sara Zumwalt and Stacks the Cat.

We are all suffering from the closing of independent bookstores, but Linda the bookstore cat is going to have a particularly hard time of it when NYC indie Skyline Books closes later this month.

Here's the story, from Gothamist.

Predictions from Smashwords (they publish and distribute ebooks) via Galley Cat:

1. 95% of all reading will be on screens.
2. There will be fewer bookstores, though books will be more plentiful than ever before.
3. The entire book supply chain from author to customer will become atomized into its component bits. Value-adders will continue to find great success in publishing.
4. Most authors will be indie authors.
5. Successful publishing companies will be those that put the most net profit in the author's pocket.
6. If the big six NY book publishers (the fat head) today publish 50% of what's sold, and the long tail of thousands of indie publishers comprise the rest, then 10 years from now the fat head will shrink to 10% and the long tail will get both taller and longer.
6. There will be more published authors than ever before, and collectively they will earn record revenues, yet individually the average "published" author 10 years from now will earn less than the average "commercially published" author today.
7. 10 years from now, we will all be authors, publishers and booksellers
8. Digital books will most commonly be referred to as "books," not ebooks.
9. For those who still call books ebooks, it'll be spelled "ebook," not E-Book or e-book. Who today still calls email E-Mail?
10. Authors will write for a global market.