Jason Epstein Quotes

I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com.

Remember that just because major publishing is having trouble, that doesn't mean people have stopped reading books. Printed books won't go away, but ebooks won't go away, either.

Look at the world of books nowadays. People just download books. They don't go to a bookstore. Amazon is wiping out Borders and Barnes and Noble. Those are brilliant examples of ephemeralization doing more with less at a better price.

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.

Now it's easy for someone to set up a storefront and reach the entire world in very modest ways. So these technologies that we thought would dis-intermediate traditional sellers gave more people the tools to be sellers. It also changed the balance of power between sellers and buyers.

There's almost no author alive who isn't weathering the tumultuous changes in the publishing industry.

Kindle Singles is publishing on skates. It prints like lightning; our book meets readers in hours. I've spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.

Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market.

There's an idea out there that salespeople have actually been obliterated by the Internet, which is just not supported by the facts.

Over many generations, fortunes in the business world were made through buying and selling products in physical stores. Internet fortunes have been made buying and selling products online.

Technology has changed the way book publishing works, as it has changed everything else in the world of media.

The power of digital distribution over physical retail outlets is you have a chance to create a global audience.

It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.

I knew people were independently publishing, and I buy books on Amazon. I began seriously considering it when Amanda Hocking was in the news about her self-publishing success.

We really see the future of what we call 'distributed commerce,' so how we get our content, our products, and our brands to consumers.

'The Expats' would not exist without e-books.

The difference between online and offline commerce is basically blurring and disappearing.

So much has changed in our business. E-books, that's been one of the principal developments. There has been also the failure of Borders and the rise of Amazon, just to name two others.

It seems the world of book publishing is constantly changing. Whether it was the rise of chain stores or their decline, or the digital revolution... fortunately, we have been able not only to adapt but to thrive.

I think when I first sold digital comics it was sort of on a whim.

Straight-up digital delivery will be the way the future works.

To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper.

It [eBook] is like introducing the machine gun to a revolutionary war. It changes everything. If you can reach your fans directly without having to go through a middle man, the entire economics of the publishing business changes.

Distributers don't need massive amounts of square feet to stock digital products. Retailers don't need brick-and-mortar stores to sell them. The entire supply chain for these select items has been permanently dematerialized. The marketplace has been blown to bits.

I listen to tech podcasts and read tech news everyday. So I am not unfamiliar with Amazon's practices. I'm not surprised that they bought Comixology.