Welcome back to Joe Wikert—a past TeleRead contributor with sterling credentials in both old-time publishing and the e-book variety. Starting today, TeleRead will again be running his authoritative posts.
Joe is director of strategy and business development at Olive Software, which serves the newspaper and book industries, among others. Prior to joining Olive, he was general manager, publisher and chair of the Tools of Change (TOC) conference at O’Reilly Media, Inc. Joe managed each of the editorial groups at O’Reilly as well as the Microsoft Press team and the retail sales organization. Before joining O’Reilly, he was vice president and executive publisher at John Wiley & Sons, Inc., in its Professional and Trade Division.
These days, beyond his Olive work, Joe publishes a lively blog called Joe Wikert’s Digital Content Strategies: An industry critic’s view of our rich content future.
We’ll pick up posts from there and add value—with comments from members of the TeleRead community. We encourage civil dialogue with Joe, whom we’ll list on our staff page as a contributing writer. His posts will be in line with TeleRead’s reputation for candor. Here’s a sample from his commentary on BookExpo America (BEA) last month:
“The Javits Center must have some sort of time warp technology. I recently attended the BEA event there and I kept asking myself the same question: Is this 2015 or 2005? The digital vibe was almost nowhere to be found in the expo hall. For example, publishers are still handing out stacks of print galleys and samples. Is that really more effective than digital copies? Wouldn’t it be better to distribute e-versions and gather customer info along the way? All this talk of establishing direct relationships with readers and having access to the resulting data still seems to be the stuff of fiction.”
Olive itself offers direct-to-consumer tools in its products lineup, and I applaud such efforts as one way to reduce publishers’ reliance on Amazon and the like.
