FutureBook

News reaches our shores that "The love affair with apps is officially over". This is the conclusion drawn by Forrester and Digital Book World and presented at their New York conference by James McQuivey. Read more »

I’ve spent the last two and one-half days with about 1500 of my closest friends at Digital Book World 2012, this week’s entry into the publishing conference sweepstakes. The conference has grown tremendously in terms of attendance, number of sponsors and breadth of programming over its three-year life and along with some very good speakers and panels, provides an excellent networking opportunity. (Disclosure: I’m a conference junkie and this is one of eight or ten I’ll attend this year. Read more »

Self-publishing star Amanda Hocking has said she turned down a higher advance from Amazon in order to strike her publishing deal with the 'legacy' publisher, St Martin's Press, because she was concerned about the giant internet company's ability to get the printed books into shops. Read more »

The book business is “like the wild west. Everyone wants to be everything", Hyperion publisher Ellen Archer said to 1500-plus attending Digital Book World in New York on Tuesday.  Where is separation between author, publisher, agent, retailer these days? Read more »

As Digital Book World -- the first of the two big post-Christmas US e-book conferences -- opens, last week's education announcement by Apple shows how easy it is now for any of the big digital companies to hijack the publishing conversation. Read more »

In New York last week, Apple announced their big play for the textbook market. It consists of three elements: a new iBooks Author tool, an update to the iBooks app, and an update to the iTunes University app.

iBooks Author Read more »

Last week we wrote about the logic of the appeal of the short story in this new digital world and yesterday we attended The Museum of London’s special 200th celebration of Charles Dickens.

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I was deliberating what I’d write about in my first post for Futurebook and begun by considering the hot subjects everyone is talking about – what % of sales could eBooks account in the future? Are Kobo or Apple genuinely going to give Amazon a run for their money in ebook sales? Read more »

So what was the biggest news story this week? Read more »

So, Apple's big disruption of the entire educational publishing business turns out to be [drumroll]:

• iBooks2
• iBooks Author, and
• iTunes U courseware.

Yesterday, I was worried about what Apple were going to do. Not paranoid - Apple don't create content, which is what we consider our most valuable asset - but worried. Now, though? Not so much. Read more »