FutureBook

How is the publishing business going in the App Store?

Today's Top Grossing iPhone book is Marvel Comics, charting at 46. The Comics app is 64. There are no single edition book apps in the Top 200.

The iPad’s Top Grossing chart is more forgiving — Comics and Marvel Comics are both in the top 20. Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe is the highest ranked book app at 95 (although, and perhaps in a nod to discoverability, it is listed in the Reference category, not Books). Read more »

The recent announcement that Microsoft have bought a 17.6% sha Read more »

In digital publishing no sooner do we reach one milestone than another slaps us in the face. The figures released this week by Hachette UK are the first to truly demonstrate the step-change in e-book consumption since the beginning of the year.

Digital sales in the first quarter of 2012 were up 250% on the same period in 2011. E-book sales accounted for 20% of sales of relevant titles and over 30% in the case of certain fiction titles, an average of 25% of adult trade sales. Read more »

Like the book trade, libraries are in a constant state of change and disruption and this has been a particularly sobering year, with public sector cuts biting horribly hard. There has been a remarkable outburst of public support for libraries – including support from high profile authors such as Alan Bennett and Zadie Smith – and strong local protests. Read more »

Nathan M Farrugia’s recently released debut novel The Chimera Vector has dropped into a sea of digital content at the centre of a global conversation around the future of reading. Read more »

Stephen Leather is one of a growing band of authors that have risen to prominence thanks to the e-book. In fact, Leather was the first UK Kindle sensation, having self-published three thrillers digitally—The Basement, Once Bitten and Dreamer’s Cat—over Christmas 2009 in order to take advantage of the expected surge in device ownership. He has since sold more than 350,000 editions of these titles in e-book format. Read more »

When Pottermore launched their ebook store at the end of March, the publishing industry stood still and watched in amazement. Read more »

The literary agent Andrew Wylie once remarked that 'in the long run, the most valuable author of all is Shakespeare.' The well documented short-termism of major trade publishers has created a market congested with meerkats and strictly-come-novelists. In an industry obsessed by market share and short-term sales, month-long bestsellers will always take precedence over serious literature which, if it sells at all, does so steadily over time. In a depressed market, this nervousness of unpredictable long-term investment is understandable. Read more »

The publication of the latest e-book and physical book numbers show how far the publishing industry has gone in a short period of time, where it is going, but sadly not how to get there. The unvarnished truth is that e-books are keeping our heads above water, but the pace of change is also hindering our capacity to swim. Read more »

I don’t think many publishers are sitting there saying ‘What are our digital experiments, how are we measuring them let’s see how they’re working.’ I’d like to pretend I was structuring it that way but effectively I’m going ‘What can we do Read more »