“If you can call it that. Why is it every halfwit and sitcom star has his own book out now?”— Spike Feresten, Mr. Lippman, Harris Shore, imdb.com
“Being a solo publisher without a whole lot of scale is tough and is going to get tougher. Scale always ends up mattering. We’re entering a period of consolidation, and if you’re a small, medium-sized publisher, it’s tough out there. You’re always a nice-to-have, never a must-buy.”— Ben Lerer, digiday.com
“Consumers are so empowered now that they can bypass almost any kind of marketing they want. People will ignore or skip anything they don’t like. So brands have to start making things they love”— Steve Pratt, digiday.com
“Mr. Banisauskas says he expects $20 million to $30 million in revenue this year.”— Kevin Roose, nytimes.com
“We’re very beholden to exchanges. That’s where pretty much all of our revenue comes from. That means our brand has changed a lot. It’s a conundrum for us. We developed an audience of millions on a budget of about $50,000 a month. There was a lot of upside to being honest, and it created a huge emoti…”— Anonymous, digiday.com
“It's merely this: no matter your reasoning for piracy, publishers don't print box sets or extras without the numbers on paper. Not about me.”— Maggie Stiefvater, twitter.com
“We don't check what people say before they say it, and frankly, I don't think our society should want us to. Freedom means you don't have to ask permission first, and that by default you can say what you want.”— Mark Zuckerberg, facebook.com
“Trump says Facebook is against him. Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don't like. That's what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”— Mark Zuckerberg, facebook.com
“I have never seen social interaction this fucked up, and I’ve been in prison.”— Kat Rosenfield, vulture.com
“When I was at Thought Catalog, we kind of had creative liberty that we could just write what we wanted, and that’s just what kept coming out. That’s just what I wanted to write about, what I was dealing with and what other people could maybe get something from.”— Brianna Wiest, lancasteronline.com
“There’s been a lot of great journalism done in the past year about inequality and unemployment in America and all of that is inspiring, in the sense that it makes me realize that I can use this site [Gawker] for something better than just hearing the sound of my own voice all the time.”— Hamilton Nolan, jimromenesko.com
“The rapid growth of the Internet and the proliferation of electronic resources have created a crushing need for better methods of describing and organizing these resources for efficient retrieval. Interest in such methods extends beyond the library community.”— Lois Mai Chan, amazon.com
“Mainstream publishing is a Rube Goldberg machine of perverse economic incentives, in which large numbers of mostly idiotic self-help guides, diet books, and airport thrillers subsidize an ever-shrinking number of mostly money-losing literary novels and books of poetry.”— Michael Bourne, themillions.com
“PopSugar built tools to analyze the audience and intent data from its website and shopping platform, ShopStyle, so the content studio doesn’t have to sit around and wait for RFPs to come in but can proactively pitch brands itself.”— Ross Benes, digiday.com
“Even if we’re full of despair over what the internet has become, it’s good to remind yourself that it’s an amazing thing. In the habits that we enjoy, there are the seeds for the future. That’s where the good internet will rise up again.”— Nick Denton, fortune.com
“In the age of algorithms and social media, can we create an enclave where creative and intellectual sophistication still matter?”— Chris Lavergne, techcrunch.com
“Books aren’t an antiquated technology. Books are cutting-edge technology.”— Chris Lavergne, techcrunch.com
“I think everyone develops to what they measure and what is told to be valuable. If you are a recirculation company, you optimize for clicks, because a click is what makes me money—not necessarily what happens after the click. And that lends itself to the most clickbait stuff we can possibly do to ma…”— Tony Haile, contently.com
“The publishing industry looks a lot like one of these bestselling teenage dystopias: white and full of people destroying one another to survive.”— Daniel Jose Older, amazon.com