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Daniel Menaker, former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House and fiction editor of The New Yorker writes in the Barnes & Noble Review about the realities of publishing, including the dynamic and paradoxical pressures of choosing books that will produce a market success. A must read for BooksAhead readers, as it strips away the mythos of publishing [...]

There’s a powerful myth in publishing: A copy of a book can be perfect every time. The transition from scribal reproduction to printed books, for example, is supposed to mark a break in the history of knowledge, when “perfect copies” became ensured each time a book went to print. However, it turns out that print [...]

Another historical perspective on e-books, this from the August 8, 1994 edition of Digital Media: A Seybold Report. I’d published my first interactive book, in Voyager’s Expanded Book format, about a year earlier.
A market in hand for electronic publishers?
With so many industries focused on getting the interactivity into televisions and PCs, there’s not much interest [...]

This is a sidebar I published in Digital Media: A Seybold Report in August 1994 about where the electronic publishing market had come in its short life and where it might be going. You’ll see we’ve come a long way and, in many ways, hardly progressed at all since the mid-Nineties. — M.R.
More than six [...]