Laura Dawson

Most publishers are now releasing books in 5 formats: the traditional hardcover and paperback, as well as Kindle, ePub and PDF. That’s at a minimum – and does not include audio, or enhanced ebooks with multimedia features embedded. Publishers are selling these different formats at different prices in the supply chain – agency pricing to [...]

It’s been almost exactly seven months since I started working at Firebrand, and sort of put blogging and newslettering on hiatus. But I think (insert a million caveats here) that I’m now feeling grounded enough in this work so that I can start commenting publicly again without fear of putting my foot in my mouth [...]

Launched yesterday, after nine months of hype, the Blio reader fell so short of so many expectations (expectations that have become basic market requirements for digital reading), it was deemed by many as a failure. What struck me is that many of the failures are fundamentally at odds with the one thing that Kurzweil was [...]

Well, we’re back after something of a summer hiatus, and of course there’s news to report. Weirdly, I’m reporting on myself. (It just feels…odd….) After a whirlwind courtship that lasted all of about 5 days, Firebrand liked it (er, me) and put a ring on it. Me. Whatever. Anyway, as of today I am joining Fran [...]

The announcement on Tuesday that “Barnes & Noble Is Putting Itself Up For Sale” pretty much set Twitter on fire last night. Where had this even come from? We thought Borders was the one in trouble! Make no mistake, Borders is still in trouble. But the state of Borders has nothing to do with B&N’s pondering [...]

Two weeks ago I was fortunate to be asked to speak at the Associazione Italiana Editori’s EdiTech conference in Milan. I gave my usual StartwithXML spiel (“ROI” is the same in English and Italian), but I was really struck by the presentations of the other participants – from Italy, yes, but also France, Switzerland, Germany, [...]

On Twitter, I follow a gentleman named Mike Cane, who blogs in several places but most lately blew my mind today. Over this past weekend, my youngest daughter (who is known as Scamp on Twitter) had to go to a birthday party. She’s nearly 12 now, and she wanted to get a Really Awesome Present for [...]

LJND: What, exactly, is GetGlue supposed to do? (yes, the corporate speak, but let’s have it in English too?) AG: Plain and simple, we’re there to help users figure out what to read, watch, listen to, or play next. There’s a bunch of different ways that we do that, from personalized new release recommendations to allowing [...]

It’s going to happen slowly, and then it’s going to happen very quickly. It has already started – the rate at which independent bookstores have shuttered over the years is not publicized, but we know they’ve been an endangered species since the 1990s, when Borders and Barnes & Noble began their rapid superstore expansion. Borders is [...]

This week at the ECPA Executive Leadership Summit, Kelly Gallagher of Bowker reported that over a million ISBNs were produced in the last year. I remember when the entire content of Books in Print was less than a million titles. That was 20 years ago. [...]