Books don’t sell

Anita Elberse has amassed and presented data showing that digital distribution has actually made blockbusters a better business bet than ever.

Every additional customer accrued a cost, whether that be the marginal cost of serving them or the opportunity cost of not serving a different customer. Given that, it was, as Christensen noted, perfectly rational to focus on the most profitable ones.However, something else momentous happened around 20 years ago: the emergence of the Internet. As I... See more

Mike’s father, Leonard Shatzkin, the person who long ago laid out this framework for publishing economics, suggested that every house that believes in assigning a percentage for “overhead” to the calculation of title profitability do the following exercise. Recalculate last year’s business but throw out—pretend you didn’t publish—all the books this

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Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House, says the top 4 percent of titles drive 60 percent of the profitability. That goes for the rest of them too: