Eoin Purcell

It is nice to know that success in publishing is by no means ruled out for even for those who have passed on. Julia Child‘s Mastering The Art of French Cooking is storming the New York Times Best Seller Charts because of the movie? Who know why, but great story.

Daily Finance “looks under the hood” of Jane Friedmann’s newish outfit and what she may be up to:

A publishing executive who preferred not to be quoted by name said that the wholesale consolidation and downsizing in the book business over recent years has created the perfect conditions for a venture based on snapping up and monetizing forgotten books. “A lot of editorial intelligence and institutional memory has been laid off or merged out of existence,” he says. “There’s a lot of owned intellectual property that’s radically underexploited.”

Rumour has it that Amazon is launching the Kindle in Europe very soon. I am not so sure.

Interesting thoughts on the future of the publishing industry from Douglas Rushkoff in Publisher’s Weekly. I’m not sure I agree with everything, but some of it makes sense:

Publishing is a sustainable industry—and a great one at that. The book business, however, was never a good fit for today’s corporate behemoths. The corporations that went on spending sprees in the 1980s and ’90s were not truly interested in the art of publishing. These conglomerates, from Time Warner to Vivendi, are really just holding companies. They service their shareholders by servicing debt more rapidly than they accrue it. Their businesses are really just the stories they use to garner more investment capital. In order to continue leveraging debt, they need to demonstrate growth. The problem is that media, especially books, can’t offer enough organic growth—people can only read so many books from so many authors

Mike Shatzkin floats some thoughts on debut pricing for ebooks and so does the Bait ‘n’ Beer blog. Both worth reading.

Several book purchases made today, 1, 2, 3, 4 in fact!
Eoin