Entries tagged with “37 signals” from Tools of Change for Publishing

Targeting Small Companies with Small Products

Mac Slocum
June 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Bill Taylor's short profile of 37 Signals looks at the upside of building small products for small companies:

Most technology companies are obsessed with the "enterprise" market -- Fortune 500 giants with complicated problems and big budgets. 37Signals builds software for entrepreneurs and small companies where the executives who buy the product also use the product -- a market that they call the Fortune 5,000,000: "We solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else," the company likes to say.

Software and publishing aren't completely analogous, but with ebooks, digital delivery and print-on-demand, there's certainly an opportunity for book publishers to serve smaller markets with smaller publications.

Related Stories:

• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• Digital Experiments and Useful Analytics Must Go Hand-in-Hand
• Does Skipping Publishers Mean Skipping Libraries?

Does Skipping Publishers Mean Skipping Libraries?

Andrew Savikas
March 31, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

When I speak to an audience of publishers, I use Getting Real as an important example of how popular bloggers who want to publish can easily skip publishers all together. 30,000 copies of a self-published PDF @ $19 (with no incremental unit cost) implies some enviable margins.

Tim Spalding over at LibraryThing brings up an unintended but important consequence of skipping publishers, especially when the resulting book becomes culturally important: right now it's also skipping libraries:

OCLC's WorldCat records exactly three copies—MIT, California Polytechnic and the University of Nebraska. That's three copies of one of the top tech books of the 00's in most of the US libraries that matter. The Library of Congress? New York Public? Harvard? None of them. For comparison, WorldCat contains 619 copies of Solitary sex : a cultural history of masturbation.