Lauren Simonutti is a Baltimore-based artist/photographer. Having been told that her work didn’t “fit in” in the US (and having more positive experiences in European and Australian markets), she turned to the web—more precisely, to self-publishing her artwork in print-on-demand books through Lulu—in order to reach her audience. I’ve been interested in using print-on-demand for [...]

In my first post on this blog I wrote (critically) about ACAP – a thoroughly wrong-headed attempt by some publishers to enforce stringent limitations on the way search engines index the content that publishers make public on their websites. Today ACAP is completely dead in the water. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (see those links for [...]

Free distribution of digital content (music, books, visual art) is embraced by—and benefits—customers because it gives them access to a much wider range of content. This is because the restrictions on the amount of content they could get—based on how much they can financially afford—is eliminated. Instead of money, the bottleneck becomes the time required [...]

In every industry I’ve worked in, people have been obsessively concerned about underpricing their products. Underpricing, they say, devalues the products (because, as Chris Anderson pointed out recently, they make the mistake that “the only way to measure value is with money”). This “underpricing=bad” argument might have some mileage for products made of atoms, but [...]

I spent my last post looking at Publishers, ebooks and what successful strategies could be used to make money. I want to return to that briefly, as I’ve just read in the Sunday Times that two publishers have got it completely wrong. Random House and Hachette, which together control just over 30% of the British [...]