FutureBook

In the jostle for market share in the tablet space Amazon is betting it will sell a great deal of content through the Kindle Fire as unlike its fierce competitor Apple it does not make money on its hardware sales. Read more »

A curate's egg was how one delegate described this year's Italian e-book conference IfBookThen - a concatenation of theories, pitches, ideas and essays delivered in front of a largely demure crowd of about 200 Italian publishers and booksellers in a very snowy Milan. Read more »

AUTOBIOSHAME: Bitterness, bile and black-hearted disillusionment make for a curious campaign brand. I know that. Read more »

Like many other devastatingly witty and handsome geeks worldwide, I’ve recently been engrossed in a seemingly endless saga of dynastic intrigue, vicious betrayal, espionage and political corruption. But enough about the Leveson inquiry! Ha ha, I’m here all week, please enjoy the buffet. Read more »

The Huffington Post reports that US Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski have challenged schools and publishers to make the conversion to digital textbooks within five years. Now, on one level, this is straightforward enough - most educational publishers can do this now and already are, to some extent. But the elephant in the room is what they mean by 'digital textbook'. Read more »

With less than a 2 % market share, e-books are still to come in Denmark. 

The year 2011 saw a small breakthrough for e-books in Denmark.  However, we are still waiting for the big sales figures to kick in. While we are waiting, some questions are vital. Who will drive the Danish e-book market? How to deal with pricing? What kinds of business models will suit the digital book market? And how can we embrace the new possibilities? Read more »

Barnes & Noble has said that it will not stock, in its stores, books published under any of Amazon's imprints - including importantly those released by Amazon Publishing's East Coast Group -- run by Larry Kirshbaum -- the books from which will go to market under Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's newly named New Harvest imprint. Read more »

The current UK number one hardback fiction title, Private Games by Patterson & Sullivan, selling a less than overwhelming five thousand copies is selling through Amazon at £9.49, with a Kindle edition at £6.39. The previous week’s number one, Stuart MacBride’s Birthdays for the Dead, is currently selling for £7.00 in hardback and £6.99 in Kindle.

Private Games is at thirty six on the kindle charts. Birthdays for the Dead at a hundred and twenty six. There are a grand total of three titles in the Kindle top fifty with prices over five pounds. Read more »

The ISBN, ISSN, BIC and BISC codes and jacket images have all helped the trade, but do they still matter as much in the digital and direct marketing era? Read more »

With direct-to-consumer (D2C) e-commerce websites a growing feature of the UK publishing / bookselling scene, in the wake of the success of these sites in the US, I have a few tips on what and what not to do with regard to user engagement during the checkout process. There are many ways to enhance publisher sites - book reviews, author blogs, author events and other promotional activities, newsletters, competitions, reader forums, etc. Read more »