I just finished a Skype interview with Mike Shatzkin, a widely followed consultant, analyst, and futurist in the world of digital publishing. Our conversation will be the interview for TKC 195 this Friday. I have spent the last couple of days reading the book he published last year, The Shatzkin Files, Volume I, browsing posts at his Shatzkin Files blog, and watching YouTube clips of presentations he’s made at various gatherings. The clip above is the first of seven segments of a talk that he gave in December of 2009. In it I learned that he has only bought one book in print since buying an original Kindle in 2007, but he now reads exclusively on his smartphone because it’s so convenient to carry everywhere.
An early adopter of e-reader technology, way back in the Palm Pilot days, Shatzkin himself has 50 years of experience in the traditional publishing business and spends much of his time advising major publishers how to evolve in the digital era. He fears the dominance of Amazon in publishing and will be sounding the alarm during the next six weeks about the Department of Justice’s anti-trust suit against Apple and five big publishers. You’ll hear the reasoning behind his fear in the interview.
If the video above interests you in more of the 2009 talk, titled “Planning for a Long Career in an Industry That’s Changing,” presented to a packed house at Hachette, here are the rest of the segments: two, three, four, five, six, seven. Shatzkin is a lively, articulate speaker, and if you are passionate about the Ebook Revolution, I believe you will enjoy this account of where we’ve been and what may lie ahead.
Send to Kindle