Wednesday, October 27, 2010

enewsy morning

Lots of enews this morning. A furore about Meanjin maybe going online - solely! Louise Adler said: " The ratio of what you print and what you publish onlline is a question that is changing for all of us. I don't want to be prescriptive."

Peter Craven in the Age does not see online as a substitute for print, at least for Meanjin; online lacks Meanjin's hallmark permanence. "It's a magazine that people look back on." says Craven. I'm not quite getting this argument - online allows for editions of the magazine to be online permanently and to be searchable, more so than print. There's another argument here that he's not putting forward. Is it that the subscriptions for an online version would dry up, killing the magazine?

Max Barry's novel Machine Man,which he published one page at a time on his website, is to be made into a Hollywood movie. A previous (print) novel of Barry's has been optioned but never filmed.

The ebook sales in this country are still more hype than reality from what I've heard - less than 1% of print sales. But the landscape of publishing is changing fast and ebooks is part of that shift, but ebook sales aren't part of that - at least as yet.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

rebranding and rereleasing a series

There's been a lot of discussion about this at the kennel this morning. It's no uncommon but does it work or is it just hopeful? It seems to be more common over on the other side of the Pacific than here, say or this. In my time in publishing has worked but my suspicion is that, more often than not, it is about travelling hopefully. Has Nielsen and computer inventory systems loaded the dice against success?

Monday, October 04, 2010

more froth than coffee

What I'm getting out of this article from Publishing Perspectives is that outside the US ebook sales are still negligible. There's a lot more froth about ebooks than there is revenue.

The music industry has publishers bothered, but is it going to be the same?