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Publishing is adapting, not disappearing.

Why is publishing doing better than other "culture Industries"

Andrew Sullivan commentary on the publishing industry.

If ebook readers succeed, will publishers be smarter than the music industry in the face of digitization and the web? Some guidelines on how publishers can avoid some of the mistakes of the music industry peers

Thanks for posting this, Arnie. I've been watching the rise of the Kindle for a while. It popped up at various publishing conferences a few years back. As a reader, it does have some appealing qualities. But, the product is too expensive to go mainstream just yet, in my view. I'd be nervous to schlep a $400 device on international trips with multiple time zones/hotel stays. It's okay if I accidentally leave a paperback behind in a plane or forget it in my hotel room, but you'd have to be careful with a Kindle--it sort of changes my perception of reading materials when I'm traveling.

No industry is recession proof, but a decline of 2.8% looks fairly modest by comparison to other industries. Caveats for this report - it's based on 81 publishers, and includes segments that had solid growth (paperbacks).

Talks about how an Apple iTablet can change the publishing industry in the same way that the iPod revolutionized the music industry

With ad revenue and audience on the decline, newspapers look to e-readers as a possible new revenue path. But early signs show that "win-win" deals between publishers and e-reader developers are both elusive and nonprofitable.

Lessons for book publishers from the music industry sprinkled with some pessimism that major publishers will heed the lessons.

Something from the music industry. Many of you may have heard about iTunes getting the labels to agree to DRM-free music in exchange for a new princing structure. But things are not going so smoothly in upgrading to DRM-free music. Looks like iTunes could use a solid analysis of its system architecture to see where the bottleneck is.

Amazon's reader is a brilliant device that shanghais book buyers and the book industry into accepting a radically diminished marketplace for published works.

Readapaper.com covers the newspaper industry. The site offers news, views and other information about newspaper issues.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about the "Dumb Money" story, in fact, is that everyone involved -- author, agent and publisher -- saw it as an experiment, the kind of small-scale trial run that a late-adopting industry needs to do a lot more of.

Herald publisher predicts near-term industry shift to paid online model

Amazon started life as a book retailer, and as a book retailer they made books cheaper. Then they were pioneers in the e-book industry where they made books cheaper. Their recently announced plan to give readers free e-book copies of books they buy in physical form doesn't make books cheaper per se, but it does give readers greater value for their book-buying dollar. This is all great stuff. But not everyone agrees. Emily Gould complains that "When ebooks and pbooks are bundled, the ebooks are sold at a loss. That's authors', publishers' and, associatively, non-AMZN retailers' loss" and "frustrating we have to keep explaining that ebook production is not free. digital objects are not made by elves."

A literary agent's perspective on the book industry, its threats and some ideas about expanding copyright protections.

Tasking itself to produce a study on the "reinvention of journalism," the Federal Trade Commission has encountered many of the same quandaries the industry has.

Traditional publishers are discussing an industry-wide digital storefront where Apple tablet users could buy digital issues without going through iTunes.