Going back to the old long-post format

Early this year, in order to promote my consulting practice, I launched a weekly newsletter that focused on eBook industry news. It was popular with readers, but I couldn't get the number of readers to a level that justified the work that went into producing it each week. So, I moved the posts into this blog, and did daily updates. That doubled or tripled the average readership of each article--but it left me with an ethical dilemma.

Most of what I've written over the almost seven years of this blog has been original analysis and opinion, but with the change in direction that I took in June, the focus has become aggregation. I've been careful to credit the original source(s) for each article at or near the beginning of my summary, and I've tried to make it worthwhile for readers to click on the link and go back to the original article for more details. Nevertheless, I'm either depending on the original reporting of others, or condensing press releases and adding a bit of context--neither of which are journalism. (I'm not saying that it's my intention to commit journalism, but aggregation isn't journalism under even the most generous definition.)

In addition, I've confused (and probably lost) a lot of the readers who came to this site for information about video and DSLRs. I tried to cover both eBooks and video, but with my focus on eBooks, video took a seat way at the back of the bus. I should have made the change in direction clearer to my readers, and I probably should have split the blog into two, with one section exclusively covering eBooks and the other doing the same for video.

There are many sources that you can use to get daily news about eBooks, so as of today, I'm going to go back to the old format. I've published a list of sources below, and I'll update the blog list in the right-hand column with those sources. If you've started reading The Feldman File because of the stream of aggregated articles, I hope that you'll stay on board for my original articles.

Here's a list of some of the sources that I used to compile my daily posts:

• AppNewser (formerly eBookNewser)
• Book Business
• The Bookseller (by subscription; limited free access)
• Digital Book World
• The Digital Reader
• Ebook Friendly
• edSurge
• Engadget
• Good E-Reader
• Mind/Shift
• The New York Times (paywall; limited free access)
• paidContent/GigaOm
• Publishers Lunch Deluxe (by subscription)
• Publishers Weekly
• Publishing Perspectives
• TechCrunch
• Teleread
• The Wall Street Journal (paywall; limited free access)