RicDay on Publishing

The media has been buzzing this week with tales of terrible deeds by Amazon. Amazon is killing your local bookstore, pushing publishers to the brink, and maybe making unicorns extinct. Really?

Lazy, sloppy, or plain incompetent? I am unsure which applies to journalists who equate “shipped” with “sold” in business articles.

Kobo is suddenly back in the news, after some interesting new deals to sell ebooks in Europe were revealed at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The commentary on how this positions Kobo among the other players in the ebook retail game has been interesting.

Back in February I wrote about 2010 as our year of medical Hell, the result of an awful case of Salmonellosis early in the year for me, and brain surgery to remove a cyst for my wife. I expected 2011 to be better. I was wrong.

The decision yesterday by Hewlett Packard to put the TouchPad out of its misery and to seek a buyer for its PC business was interesting, and instructive. HP was not alone in struggling to find a toehold in the tablet business. Every maker, other than Apple, faces the same struggle. And all are making very similar mistakes.

I am finally Windows free, and I am happier for it. I have had a rocky relationship with Redmond’s products stretching all the way back to the first commercial version of DOS on an IBM clone box: MS-DOS 1.0, bought in 1982, which was really a Tim Paterson’s clone of CP/M with some smudged lipstick.

Every once in a while, I get reminded just how truly miserable Chapters-Indigo's inventory management systems are. Today was one of those days. I wanted to purchase a Kobo WiFi Touch for someone in the office. It seemed like it should be simple.

Yesterday’s announcement by Amazon that they have retained Larry Kirshbaum to head their publishing operations should not have come as a surprise. It was inevitable.