I have a few reservations about Open Access. In some respects, that’s hardly surprising. After all, I work for a big publisher – not, admittedly, an Elsevier, but still one of the world’s largest university presses, one of those not-for-profit organisations whose deep differences from the likes of Elsevier are too commonly elided in the…
Category: opinions
How to get ahead in publishing
I was asked to give a short talk at the 2013 London Book Fair on a panel session organised by the Society of Young Publishers. Here are my notes from the talk; you can also download them in PDF format at the end. #1 YOUR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IS FAR TOO IMPORTANT TO BE ENTRUSTED TO…
Reaching readers: my talk from the 2013 Independent Publishers Guild conference
Academic and professional publishers’ routes to market are changing fast. In this talk, I showcased some of the best ways to build close relationships in niche communities and across social media. If you prefer, you can download a PDF of this talk at the end of the post. INTRODUCTION I’ve ten years’ experience in digital…
What publishing can learn from the fate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
In the highly unlikely event that anyone in publishing even vaguely remembers me in ten years’ time, it’ll be for this analogy. I can live with that. It was at Frankfurt last year, on a Tools of Change panel with Brian O’Leary and Sheila Bounford, that I first started wittering on about the Austro-Hungarian Empire…
The Future of Publishing Report
In 2011, I was commissioned by Media Futures to research and produce what became the Future of Publishing report. I include an excerpt from it here. To download the full report from Media Futures, click here. Shaping the Future Articles, reports, and conferences on the future of publishing are increasingly common; genuinely useful insights into…
eBook pricing: learning from other people’s mistakes
My second piece for FutureBook, raising concerns about ebook pricing that we still haven’t resolved, and – three years before Amazon’s announcement of Matchbook – proposing bundling as a possible solution. Rereading this in 2013, I belatedly realise that the person who gave that very impressive presentation at Tools of Change Frankfurt in 2009 was…
The pressfuturist manifesto 