Booksquare

[BS: As we are off to attend O'Reilly's Tools of Change conference, we invited a guest writer to fill in. Ronin Kurosawa came highly recommended, though, in retrospect, we should have been more suspicious of his references. Still, we find his reporting to be thorough and excellent reading. One note, however: Ronin seems to be [...]

Now don’t get us wrong, we think that Richard Charkin is a bright, savvy man. We would have, at one point, even suggested that he understood the difference between search and anonymity. Sigh. Let us try this one more time.

Search is not about Google — search is about making sure your customers find you.

Publishers are [...]

Regular readers will recall that “death of the novel” stories appear in traditional print media (also, non-traditional non-print media) with comforting regularity. Sort of like Spring cleaning without the Windex. Somehow, there is an editorial guideline out there that equates “reading elsewhere” with the “death of reading”. We dispute this assertion.

Those who declare that the [...]

We spend quite a bit of time at Booksquare headquarters talking about what’s wrong with the publishing industry. These discussions usually focus on the industry’s seeming fear of new technology and the fact that, some days, it seems like the future of publishing will never happen.
We suspect that it’s not so much a fear [...]

From what we can tell, attending the Book Industry Study Group’s recent “Making Information Pay 2007″ conference was like reading BS every day. Except there was probably less snark. And less wine. Reading the wrap-ups is like reading our posts. Is that going to stop us from highlighting a few key points? Of course not. [...]

BS Headquarters (also home to Medialoper HQ) has been buzzing with the news that EMI has struck a deal with Apple to sell DRM-free music via the iTunes store. While this is not the unprecedented move some media would have you think — Kirk notes that labels have being doing this via eMusic for many [...]

As part of our regular contemplation of the bookselling process, we recently turned our attention to branding. Branding, we believe, is a big problem for publishers. It is also, not surprisingly, a big problem for other major media, but we think it’s a problem for publishers especially. As all the beauty that is Web 2.0* [...]

We find that we’re having some difficulty synthesizing the “Future of the Book: Dead or Alive” panel we attended on the final day of the hectic, overwhelming 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Perhaps it’s because the topic requires far longer than a one hour session. Perhaps it’s because we’re still wrapping our rain-soaked mind [...]

Darlings,
Where are you? We have been in the lovely city of Austin (the sun is shining, the grackles are, well, one doesn’t need to discuss the private functions of birds) since Thursday and haven’t seen you anywhere. We have gone so far as to take the rather rude step of reading nametags rather than looking [...]

We realize that many of you think that Booksquare is a well-oiled, well-planned, and well-considered machine. Some of you may even be under the impression that we plan our posts in advance. That is untrue. Most days we wake with a vague notion of maybe writing something brilliant. Most days, we end up erring on [...]