Category Archives: Book Reviews

Is Free the Future?: A Review of The Curve by Nicholas Lovell

PublishingTrends.com continues its regular column in which we review, explicate, and excerpt books that we think will resonate with people in the business of publishing and media. **** Implementing what we know as “the freemium model” scares a lot of businesses, and understandably so. It’s not necessarily a groundbreaking idea; consumers are used to free trials of online services, a few…Continue Reading

Driven to Disruption: Reading James McQuivey’s Digital Disruption

PublishingTrends.com continues its regular column in which we review, explicate, and excerpt books that we think will resonate with people in the business of publishing and media.  **** The word “disruption” is hardly unfamiliar to those in the publishing industry. Almost every part of book business has been affected by disruption, particularly of the digital kind, from the advent and availability…Continue Reading

Reading Deadlines and Disruption: New Media, New Pedagogy

PublishingTrends.com continues its regular column in which we review, explicate, and excerpt books that we think will resonate with people in the business of publishing and media.  **** In creating the curriculum of CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism as inaugural Dean, Stephen B. Shepard* had to fill in many blanks. It seemed that there was no set path to becoming a…Continue Reading

Through the Eyes of a Startup: Reading Todd Sattersten’s Every Book Is A Startup

PublishingTrends.com continues its regular column in which we review, explicate, and excerpt books that we think will resonate with people in the business of publishing and media.  **** Sure, putting the word “startup” in the title of a book seems to be all the rage, but can (and should) the publishing of each title be treated like a startup? In  Every…Continue Reading

Reading Adapt by Tim Harford: Your Secret Weapon? Failure.

PublishingTrends.com continues its regular column in which we review, explicate, and excerpt books that we think will resonate with people in the business of publishing and media.  **** Bemoaning the speed and amount of change she sees in the publishing industry (i.e., not enough), Suw Charman-Anderson urged publishers to read Adapt by Tim Harford in a recent Forbes article.  Adapt: Why Success Always…Continue Reading

The Chattering Classes Transformed to Tweeting Tribes

With this post, PublishingTrends.com continues its regular column in which it reviews, explicates and excerpts books that we think will resonate with people in the business of publishing and media.  **** The Tao of Twitter by Mark Schaefer  (McGraw-Hill) is coming out on August 3rd, and in the year since the first edition was published, much has changed.  More people and businesses…Continue Reading

Paying the Way: Reading John Howkins’ The Creative Economy

With this post, PublishingTrends.com continues its regular column in which it reviews, explicates and excerpts books that we think will resonate with people in the business of publishing and media.  **** With lots of comments lately about books being defined more in terms of “content” in the face of new digital media, the role of creativity in the publishing industry has become…Continue Reading

Parsing Publishing, Then and Now: Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompsen

With this post, PublishingTrends.com continues its regular column in which it reviews, explicates and excerpts books that we think will resonate with people in the business of publishing and media.  **** John B. Thompson, University of Cambridge-based sociologist and author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Plume, trade paper, 2nd Ed….Continue Reading

At Your Customer Service: Lessons from The Nordstrom Way

With this post, PublishingTrends.com continues its regular column in which it reviews, explicates and excerpts books that we think will resonate with people in the business of publishing and media.   The concept of customer service has come to the forefront for businesses hoping to assert themselves in a growing digital marketplace where a customer has…Continue Reading