The Reading Edge Podcast

I had a lively chat on March 14, 2010, in Austin, Texas, with Pablo Defendini, who is producer of Tor.com , the very alive web presence of Tor Books, which is an imprint of Macmillan.  In fact, Pablo was the one whom John Sargent, Macmillan’s outspoken CEO, asked for help creating a personal blog.

You can check out Pablo’s own blog here, and follow him on Twitter here.

If you think it’s easy to tell who the bad guys are in the eBook Revolution, talking with Pablo Defendini will cure you of simplistic judgments.  He’s the very model of a modern digital guy, working within an industry steeped in literary tradition. It’s a great story.

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James McQuivey of Forrester Research

On the Monday after the weekend when Amazon and Macmillan faced off in a dramatic battle over eBook pricing, I turned to James McQuivey, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, for his perspective on who won, what the stakes are, and what might lie ahead.

James says his contacts at other publishers are disappointed that this turned into a mud fight, but he suggests there will be benefits from having the issue finally out in the open.  He also shares his thoughts on how Apple’s new iPad figures in to all this.

I’ll have the second half of this interview on The Kindle Chronicles episode 81, which will be uploaded as usual on Friday, February 5.  In that portion, James will discuss what he and his teammates at Forrester are calling “The Kindle Flame,” by which they mean the next generation of Kindle that might, if it gets certain things right, set the eBook market fully ablaze as opposed to merely kindled.

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