Here is a quick rundown my best writing from 2011 that has appeared across several sites.
The major theme is that book publishing is amidst a major transition. Bookstores don’t know how to compete. The media is overly prone to hyperbole. And your customers don’t know what a book is anymore.
The challenges I wrote about this year are still with us and I predict 2012 will be another year of similar upheaval, the final year of a five-year disruption that started in 2007 with Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle, peaked with the 2009 Macmillan/Amazon shootout, and in its wake has created Amanda Hocking and bankrupt Borders.
Here’s to more good times in the New Year.
- Pricing Pictures: Drawings To Help You Make Better Business Decisions (Slideshare, 2/2/11) – My Groundhog’s Day giveaway of visual thinking about how the amount you charge is only the beginning of determining your pricing strategy.
- From Pages Read to Minutes Spent: Rethinking How We Quantify Reading (Publishing Perspectives, 2/3/11) – The unit of measure for every digital format is time. Why not do the same in books?
- Every Book Is A Startup (toddsattersten.com, 2/15/11) – The post that lead to my O’Reilly project by the same name.
- Let Business Books Get Shorter (toddsattersten.com, 3/3/11) – Readers want shorter books. Publishers want a business model that works.
- The Two Narratives of The Book (toddsattersten.com, 3/8/11) – Sharing bookmarks and comments with my friends is my idea of an enhanced ebook.
- Creating Confusion (toddsattersten.com, 5/31/11) – More example of how we don’t know how to talk about publishing
- The Future of Bookselling (Shelf Awareness, June 2, 2011) – Physical bookstores can’t compete on convenience with Amazon, but there is another choice.
- What Startups Can Teach Publishers (Publishing Perspectives, 9/20/11) – The relationships between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists vs. authors and publishers are more similar than you might think.
- The Paperless Book (O’Reilly Radar, 11/30/11) – The problem for publishers is that customers don’t know what a book is anymore.