Best of…

While I am finishing up the next piece for this blog, I thought it might be a good time to do a “best of my blogging” redux. By a “good time” I of course mean “I am not ready to post again and shouldn’t go more than 7 days between posts.” That said, I hope you enjoy some of the fruits of past labors:

The following are what I consider the top 5 posts I have done on BlackPlastcGlass and OUPblog.

• Number 5, on my list of top posts, was done for OUP’s OUPblog: Do I Believe In Ebooks? Part one and Part Two . This series posited that the key to the ebook reader device market will primarily be convenience. I then wondered if a print plus ebook model might not be the best of all possible worlds for reader and publishers. It was sooo February 2008!
• Number 4 is  a series that started with Disruption, moved into Generation On-Demand (a phrase coined with Fast Company contributing writer Adam Penenberg) , and ended with There Will Be Disintermediation. In many ways I am most proud of this series and I think there is far more expansive writing to be done on the topic of the content needs of Generation On-Demand.
• Number 3 was also done for the OUPblog, and was first posted on June 9, 2008. I predicted that the Kindle and the Sony Reader would sell a combined 1 million units. The consensus from a variety of sources is that Amazon sold 600,000 units and Sony 250,000 – so I was wrong (though I got the Kindle figure right) but at the time, most people thought 50,000 units would be the total Kindle sales. Check out Looks Like a Million to Me and see how I figured it all out.
• Number 2 was last week’s Ceci n’est pas un ebook where I explain the significance of Google Editions and how it/cloud publishing works… something the major media outlets somehow didn’t understand (or care to)!
• Number 1 on of my post’s was the first on BlackPlasticGlasses: Why Ebooks Must Fail. It is by far the most popular post on the blog (the “Popular Posts” count that appear in the right hand nav was only installed 2 weeks ago, so the figures do not cover views before the widget was installed). In this piece I show the publishing economy and how it works and explain how an ebook driven publishing world is unsustainable without enourmous changes to business models.

I hope you enjoy these pieces and grant me the time i need to finish the next one!

Tags: Adam Penenberg, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Digital Publishing, E-book, ebooks, Evan Schnittman, Fast Company, Google, Kindle, publishing, Sony Reader, The New York Times Company, Trade Publishing