Publishers Weekly recently hosted a stimulating and smart online session about AI and publishing, thanks to the organizing and moderating skills of Peter Brantley and Thad McIlroy. The day began with a presentation by former PRH CEO Markus Dohle and ended with one by thought leader Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School, which framed the day perfectly....

The case has been made here repeatedly over years that the business and operating model of book publishing as it has been throughout my 50+-year career is irretrievably broken. And it is increasingly obvious that this is the case across all “content” businesses — newspapers, magazines, movies, TV, and radio — and for very much the same reasons. The...

Three decades ago, if you wanted a trade book, you went to a bookstore or a bigger merchant like Wal-mart or a department store with a book “section”. It was actually hard to get a book any other way. That really changed starting with Amazon in 1995 and has continued to splinter since with a large number of online retailers making books available that...

The idea that general trade publishing and general trade publishing houses were going to have to change or die was first floated here in a post in 2007 and then expanded upon in a post called “The End of the General Trade Publishing Concept” in 2019. The announcement this week that Madeline McIntosh, a very good person and a very competent publishing...

I was very pleased with my post of last week, about how my friend Ed Rogoff could possibly self-publish a book about health called “Scary Diagnosis” better than it would be delivered to the public by a professional publisher. I put it up. My subscribers got it by email. And then Google put a big bright red WARNING screen on my site saying “malware...

We’ve previously explored what I called “the end of the trade publishing concept”, which stems from the now wide-open opportunity to publish available to anybody with a computer and something to deliver as a book. It feels like we may have reached a new benchmark: admittedly a very fuzzy one. But it looks like it has become very difficult, bordering...