FutureBook

Introduction

At Tools of Change – Frankfurt last week, I and Dan Rhatigan did a talk on design and typography in e-reading. Read more »

I blame myself for not noticing earlier. Bookshout’s announcement and demo video was a part of the last even of the day at TOCFrankfurt and at that time I was in the back, with my laptop plugged in, finally checking my emails.

So, I missed the video which would have given me a clearer idea of how Bookshout’s importer is supposed to work. Read more »

Over the last few months I’ve been preparing the launch of my ebook publishing experiment and taking notes on the process.

Studio Tendra, the first publishing experiment itself was launched a couple of weeks ago and, Heartpunk, the first book series, is off on a good start.

The first issue became obvious very early on and my experience over the first few weeks confirms it: existing ebook publishing platforms are a joke. Read more »

The greatest threat to the continuing survival of the publishing industry is… the publishing industry.

Most incumbents in the industry misunderstand the origin and nature of piracy, how it develops, how it is fostered, and how it thrives. If they did, they’d drop DRM and be scrambling around to transform the industry practices that threaten publishing’s very survival.

They don’t understand that piracy is a function of community, not technology. Read more »

I’m a huge fan of Amazon Web Services. I use them to host all of my sites and almost everybody I’ve worked with over the last few years uses them in some capacity. I also use the Kindle platform a lot, both for reading ebooks and documents.

Those are two extremely competitive platforms from the same company.

However, comparing or conflating the two, like Eric Hellman does, is rather misleading. Read more »

Usually, at the end of each year, the media gaggle gathers, regurgitates the nonsense they’ve been spouting all year, and washes the stale bile down with a set of inconsequential predictions of what might happen next year. It’s a catchall opportunity for prognostication for an industry whose main contribution to society is inane gossip and fact-free misinterpretations of research and science. Read more »

One by one, at Futurebook 2011, publishers declared what their true focus was going to be from now on, what their strengths would have to be for them to flourish after the digital transition.

A picture of a possible future emerges, allowing us to make a few educated guesses, based on how similar transitions have affected other sectors. Read more »

This Friday, after my overview of the Icelandic book market was published on thebookseller.com I received a question from twitter user @Petrona_:

Fascinating piece - no mention of ebks (eg back catalogues?) – Petrona

I didn’t mention ebooks because, for several reasons, there aren’t any ebooks sold in Icelandic. Read more »

There is always the temptation to cast the biggest player embroiled in an event as the lead player, as the one in charge, in control and closest to winning. Facebook is big, and their dance card is full of content players, but they aren't the belle of the ball, they aren't playing in the content industry let alone winning it, and they certainly aren't in control of the content libraries.

They haven't "quietly given their ¾ of a billion users access to 3 of the worlds largest content libraries, direct to their screens, in a completely device neutral environment." Read more »