The State of Sourcing

There has been quite a brouhaha over the impact of tablets and e-book readers in our lives over the past couple of years. With the iPad series being the clear front-runners, the other game-changers are Amazon’s Kindle series and the Nook by Barnes & Noble. All the potential talk over how these will have a massive influence on media, marketing and publishing is explained by the fact that Amazon and Barnes & Noble have each decided to put another 4-5 million tablets each into the market in 2012.

This holiday season, consumers are looking at buying and gifting another transformational format for the media and entertainment industry – the e-book. With the foundation being built slowly over the past two years, the e-book industry is now unleashing its full marketing potential to convince tablet owners to make the “digital switch” from traditional hard covers and paperbacks to its electronic form. Amazon and B&N have already established their proprietary e-book formats and dozens of other publishers are getting on-board to digitize their output.

Continue reading ‘Holiday season cheer for publishing outsourcing with meteoric rise in demand for e-book services’ »

Commented a respondent of our survey on ‘The Current State of Digital Content’. So,  how are things shaping up for digital formats, does everyone in the publishing industry feel the same way? Read on.

Changing the ‘format’ of content

The publishing industry has progressively been going digital. While selling digital content is recent, publishers have used digital production techniques/processes that are reliable, stable and efficient. Such processes, however, ended mostly in the creation of PDFs – that doubled as print ready files and/or a product that was to be sold digitally.

Continue reading ‘Device specific formats are horrible to support, and I hope they die!’ »

A few days ago,  Seth Godin, marketing guru and best selling author, decided to part ways with his publisher, Portfolio, to self-publish. So, why did Seth decide to self-publish? And more importantly, how much money does he stand to make?

So, why did Seth decide to self-publish?

Continue reading ‘How much will Seth Godin earn by self-publishing?’ »

From releasing a new Kindle application for Android devices to allowing customers to exchange textbooks for a gift card or announcing Facebook and Twitter support in Kindles – the past few days have been quite eventful for Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN). While these new developments reflect the inherent dynamism in the book distribution market, the possible launch of Google Editions or DangDang.com planning an IPO are indicative of the competition that the market is witnessing.

But of all the news items, what I found most interesting has been the announcement of AmazonCrossing. AmazonCrossing will use customer feedback and data from other Amazon sites to identify non-English best sellers. Once identified, Amazon will acquire and translate the book for consumption by the global English-speaking audience. The move leverages Amazon’s existing distribution networks that contain multiple channels, formats, stores and partnerships with independent book sellers.

Continue reading ‘Amazon translating into more business’ »