LISNews: Librarian News

How the digital age is making self-publishing respectable.

Full article at NYTIMES.com

Fresh Air on WHYY

Interview with Ken Auletta

Ken Auletta's latest column asks the question, "Can the iPad topple the Kindle and save the book business?" The article, published in the April 26 issue of The New Yorker magazine, discusses the ongoing battle between publishing companies and Amazon for pricing e-books, which are projected to eventually account for as much as 40 percent of all books sold.

Auletta is also the author of 11 books, including World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies and Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, which tracked the development of Google from a search engine to the provider of all things Internet. He has written the "Annals of Communications" column for The New Yorker since 1992.

Listen to full piece or read interview highlights here.

By now it must be clear to all but a handful of diehards that the business model based on returnability of books for credit, a practice instituted by the trade book industry some 75 years ago, is no longer viable. In fact it has proven to be a bargain with the Devil.

Some pundits ascribe the woes of our business to printed books themselves, saying that the medium is no longer appropriate for our times. In truth nothing is wrong with printed books. Everything is wrong with the way they are distributed.

Full blog entry at e-reads.com

Ken Auletta of The New Yorker writes:

On the morning of January 27th—an aeon ago, in tech time—Steve Jobs was to appear at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in downtown San Francisco, to unveil Apple’s new device, the iPad. Hundreds of journalists and invited guests, including Al Gore, Yo-Yo Ma, and Robert Iger, the C.E.O. of Disney, milled around the theatre, waiting for Jobs to appear. The sound system had been playing a medley of Bob Dylan songs; it went quiet as the lights came up onstage and Jobs walked out, to the crowd’s applause.

In the weeks before, the book industry had been full of unaccustomed optimism; in some publishing circles, the device had been referred to as “the Jesus tablet.” The industry was desperate for a savior. Between 2002 and 2008, annual sales had grown just 1.6 per cent, and profit margins were shrinking. -- Read More