Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins (Part 3)

SM: Describe the value proposition of Blurb, including differentiation versus the rest of the market. EG: Blurb is bringing book publishing to the masses by providing an affordable publishing platform that’s accessible to anyone with a broadband connection and modest computing skills. Every family, traveler, photographer, bride, cook, poet, teacher, blogger, and artist has a

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Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins (Part 2)

SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? EG: Well for one thing, Blurb was a very contrarian play at the time. VCs were funding blogging platforms and social networks and online plays – and here we were taking bits back into atoms. But fortunately I had good relationships in the

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Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins (Part 1)

I have written a few pieces on how the book publishing business needs to / is going to change because of the web. [Book Publishing Moves West? . Will the Digital Era Change Writing? . eBooks Future]. In this interview, I speak with Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb, who is attempting to democratize self-publishing by

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Will the Digital Era Change Writing?

The rock album is dying, with digital services letting music fans cherry-pick individual songs they like. But will something similar happen to writing? Is the novel endangered by slice-and-dice nature of the Web? Interesting article from the WSJ comparing the Future of Books to the Present of Music. My take: Most non-fiction is better presented

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Book Publishing moves West?

Looks like there is more stir in the Book Publishing world, besides my earlier article on Peter Redford’s Browse experiment. Check out www.vidlit.com which Barb Rybka tipped me on – yet another experiment on how people foresee the evolution of books into some sort of a democratic new media publishing.