Today is my birthday, and I’m taking the day off to be with the family I all too often forsake for work. So I’ve been ruminating about everything that’s happened to me in the past year and trust me, it’s been quite a year. That led me to quickly research what’s happened in publishing in the past year as well. And it’s been quite a year for publishing too.
Book publishing is a chaotic soup at present, and that was much the same a year ago. But by looking at some April 2012 occurrences, you can see just how far we’ve come in a relatively short span of time:
JK Rowling’s Pottermore launched a year ago. I have to say I expected more action from this bookstore/portal/destination than we actually have seen so far. And I kind of lost interest in it after the initial hoopla. But I’ll keep watching it to see how it evolves. You can never count this creative genius out of anything.
Oh, and we had the expansion of a little eBook phenomenon called Fifty Shades of Grey to Vintage Books in the United States where it single-handedly made Random House profitable enough to give each of their employees $5,000 bonuses last Christmas.
Microsoft invested big time in Barnes and Noble’s Nook eReader in April 2012. They started a new company (code name: NewCo) and eventually Penguin/Pearson also invested money in Nook’s trade and educational possibilities. Today I’m not sure that was a wise investment, but we’ll see what these players can do. Nook needs help and maybe Microsoft has some ideas.
All this and it would be three more months until the world would be rocked by Psy and his Gangnam Style music video that went viral on YouTube to the tune of nearly 1.5 BILLION downloads today. Wow. The UN Secretary General even called it a “force for world peace”. Which is ironic since North Korea is kind of at war with South Korea right now, Psy’s country of origin.
So that’s what I remember happening in April last year. Can you think of publishing developments I’ve forgotten?
