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All the above-mentioned nontraditional formats have seemed as if they would swamp the traditional business at different times, but instead each has peaked in popularity and the voracious readers have then either shifted to a new format or have been supplanted demographically by a new crop of readers looking for a way to slake their insatiable

George Packer in 2014, in a New Yorker piece detailing Amazon’s takeover of the book industry. With this data,

When the macro environment becomes extremely noisy and fast-moving, successful organizations often succeed by going very small and very focused, creating particle-like units of intense connection with consumers. It’s almost as if the chaotic environment itself creates the conditions that make these tight bonds necessary and possible. This effect

the technology transition has been moving from cost and efficiency to speed and adaptability (of course, customer value is everyone’s primary fitness function). This transition is illustrated by an article and a book published 10 years apart. In 2003, Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial article in the Harvard Business Review titled “IT Doesn’t

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Trim size rationalization—in other words, reduction in the number of trim sizes available—was implemented industry-wide (over a very long period of time: decades beginning in the 1950s) as part of the trend toward reducing costs in manufacturing.

The only attempt we can recall by a general trade publisher to eliminate returns was by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in the early 1980s. They introduced a new discount schedule that gave booksellers much higher discounts than were normal in the trade but without the right of return. The reception by booksellers to the attempt was so chilly that it was

After taking over Waterstones, he did something similar. He stopped all the “buy-two-books-and-get-one-free” promotions. He had a simple explanation for this too: When you give something away for free, it devalues it.

But the most amazing thing Daunt did at Waterstones was this: He refused to take any promotional money from publishers.