I’ve been reading a couple of things lately that could restore, if you were in need of such a thing, your faith in print, and in the vitality of scholarship and publishing in the digital age. The publishing industry is in crisis—well, nearly everything these days seems to be in crisis—but you would hardly realize [...]

This is an announcement. I am currently working with the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education on a project to research the marketing of university press books. The project is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The aim is to determine what university presses can do to enhance their marketing and [...]

     The Kindle is a watershed event in electronic publishing.  It is not the first ebook device, and it may not ultimately be the one that will prevail (it could of course be one of several). But its appearance marks the point where ebooks move from theory to actuality.  Whether the leading device is the [...]

Now that both the Kindle and the iPhone are out, it’s interesting to look at the very similar business strategy behind the two products. I think most of the E-Ink ebook readers in the market are doomed to failure. They don’t do enough, and what they do, they do poorly. The world gave up on [...]

[mirrored at Peter Brantley's shimenawa blog] I’ve spent the last few days in New York, and had the pleasure of meeting with various interesting folks. About which more anon, separately. Many of the conversations revolved around digital books and the future of publishing — what form will books take? Would they be downloadable objects, or [...]

Technology Review asked for my thoughts on Kindle. Here they are, slightly emended. No one can doubt that digitization and the Internet together with various factors intrinsic to the publishing industry will radically transform the distribution of books: books can now be transmitted like e-mail directly from writer to reader eliminating nearly the entire traditional [...]

The University of Pittsburgh Press has just made an extraordinary announcement. The Press plans to make its entire backlist available for free online two years after formal, print publication. Here is what the AAUP newsletter has to say about this: Recently, the University of Pittsburgh Press has announced that it is working to make its [...]