Spring in the Ku’damm
Spring came late to Berlin this year, as elsewhere in Europe. But with the Spargel festival just starting, the trees in bud on Unter den Linden, the German courts ruling that you cannot re-sell an...
View ArticleIs Open Access Over?
A sudden thought. Doing an interview with some consultants yesterday (we are fast approaching the season when some major STM assets will come back into the marketplace) I was asked where I had...
View ArticleMeet You in a New Reality…?
I blinked at today’s announcement with incredulity. Neilsen Expositions sold to private equity for $950m? (http://www.followmag.com/2013). Where does this madness end? Since 2008 we have been living,...
View ArticleWritten on Vellum
So off I went to the PPA (Periodical Publishers Association) conference, arriving unexpectedly early and thus catching the Minister of Culture trying manfully – and succeeding brilliantly – in saying...
View ArticleOmniscience and Omerta
“Although we have long made limited customer relationship data available to our journalists, we realize this was a mistake.” Doctoroff went on to note that Bloomberg terminals are also equipped with...
View ArticleHow Old is Innovation before it’s New…?
Living in a society that seems to value “innovation” above all things it is sometimes easy to forget that innovations sometimes have to wait and fester on the sidelines for many years before we...
View ArticleEducation: Ignore the Tablets, Eat the Box!
Yesterday may have seen the largest single step forward for school-based educational publishing globally for a decade, which makes it confusing, but rather appropriate, that the word “education” did...
View ArticleVZBV is out to get you!
However, I bet the US government gets you first! As the newspapers (Guardian 07/06/13) reproduce slides for training US security and FBI officials in the use of the data feeds they get from Google,...
View ArticleSeven Starters in Data Analytics
Phil Cotter’s comment on last week’s post here really got me going. Now that I know that suicide bombers max their credit cards before setting off to do the deed I somehow feel a gathering sympathy for...
View ArticleHow Do You Grow STM?
Two events this week turn us back towards this perennial question. One is the purchase of Springer by BC Partners after a prolonged affair and a lover’s tiff which forced the price up a notch to $4.4...
View ArticleAfter The Librarians…?
Last week’s blog on growing STM sparked some debate, mostly around the realization that if existing powerful publishers who work in research article publishing drive business development towards the...
View ArticleOver Niagara in an eBook
The ineffable Shatzkin reports (www.idealog.com/blog) this week on an innocent story with dramatic implications. It seems from his calculations from Hachette UK releases that if eBook sales are indeed...
View ArticleHi ! Here is Publishing !
Four minutes ago , Lauren was in the Netherlands on the way to the UK (https://sayhi.co/places/belgium/wetteren ) And she is using a new publishing platform called Hi. It may not be the right service...
View ArticleRoyal Line Diluted Online
In a land where one cannot move for Royal baby hysteria, I seem to have found myself reading a great many “Death of the Textbook” stories in the past week. A good series from the Economist on the...
View ArticleRevit : BIM brings it all Together
It was at the hog roast on Saturday afternoon , and I had just bitten appreciably into wonderful Berkshire Tamworth and crackling ( a superb achievement in itself – an anthem to a great pig ) . The...
View ArticleThe Future is Already Past
Is there a better instance of “speed of change ” than that just when you are instancing something as a prime example of future change , you next read of it as history ? We keep reminding ourselves that...
View ArticleOpen a Fab Lab and Re-Invent the Newspaper
First of all , a (very) old , ( very) bad joke . The great Roy Thomson is sitting in an aircraft at Bangkok en route to Australia . ” Get me the Bangkok Times “, he snaps to an aide . The young...
View ArticleThings Every Boy and Girl Should Know…
” Well,” she said, in a determined and slightly defensive tone of voice “the last thing we intend to do is turn ourselves into a software house. We are publishers and cannot be expected to understand...
View ArticleAfter Facebook and LinkedIn…?
Back from the holidays, and into the frothy turmoil of the Big Deal season. Verizon enriches every British pensioner and pension fund with a bigger boost via its Vodafone deal than the UK government...
View ArticleTalking Insurance to Your Motor Car
I often get questions about the future role of mobile , many of which stump me , since if you had really wanted to design a less adequate content carrier than the smartphone you would be hard put to...
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