Blog Posts about Publisher's Notes

This Friday, our publisher Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel will be speaking at the third annual Books in Browsers 2012: Authors, Tools, & Readers event at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.

Last week, Nancy Lin from the radio show Business Reinvention interviewed me and Linda Holliday, founder and CEO of Semi-linear, and I learned about Linda's cool new initiative called Citia, which serves up virtual index-card versions of ebooks. I also had a chance to share what we've been up to at Peachpit and Pearson and how dramatically our business is changing.

A few weeks ago, I moderated a panel of expert publisher-entrepreneurs in San Francisco on the future of publishing.

We published our first digital photography books some 15 years ago. But it wasn’t until 2006—when digital photography became ubiquitous and better quality cameras became more affordable—that the time was right for industry leader Scott Kelby to hit the topic out of the ballpark with his standard-setting series The Digital Photography Books (with well over a million copies sold). You can now order Part 4 of the series, which comes out next week.

All of us at Peachpit—our authors, our staff, and our loyal readers—have been touched by Steve Jobs and his influence on our creative endeavors. We will all miss him.

Forgive me for this superficial analogy, but sometimes I feel like our daily ever-vigilant efforts to stop ebook piracy are akin to my trying to pull up the bermuda grass in my backyard. I can yank up all the weeds I see, but the runners have already spread underground, and new weeds will pop up tomorrow in other areas of my lawn.

It was really bugging me this morning: I was on the phone with one of my favorite Photoshop instructors, and somehow we got to talking about monitor profiles and printer profiles and he casually dropped the phrase "black point compensation." I stopped him for some remedial training on the term.

When author, teacher, and creative photographer Chris Orwig told me the story of his Brooks' students complaining about not having a shooting subject that grabbed them, I wanted to be transported to his classroom on the spot.