FutureBook

In a blogpost here at Futurebook, shortly after this year's London Book Fair, Sam Missingham, the Bookseller's unofficial “chief twitterer”, suggested that UK publishing was using Twitter to engage in a conversation that embraced “authors and their fans, librarians and publishers, booksellers and agents”. Read more »

A great set of slides: the social web, storytellers, and brands.

Loving it. Props to Mel Exon (@melex)

I spent the last two weeks in a bucolic idyll in the foothills of the Pyrenees—fields of sunflowers and lavender, salt of the earth rustics and haystacks straight out of a Millet painting. Read more »

How are rights shifting in the digital age? Last month I attended a Publishers Information Day, organised by the German software company Klopotek, which offered some insights into how the old ways of dividing up rights are being challenged. As Klopotek said: "The definition of pubrights and subrights is becoming more and more granular as most authors and agents no longer agree to the good old: 'all rights, for all languages, for all territories' anymore." Read more »

So here we all are, waiting.

We're waiting for Judge Chin to rule in one way or another on the GBS, and even when he does there will no doubt be further wrangling. 

I'm obviously not a fan of the proposed settlement, which strikes me as liable to bring about the end of the world through rains of pudding and exploding frogs, or at least mess up the IP landscape in a hugely in-equitable and unhelpful way at a time when clarity is really important.  Read more »

I spend far too much of my time thinking about the music business. It's partly the emotional attachment formed by spending my formative years listening to jangly guitar bands on scratched black slabs of vinyl. It's partly professional too, though: I work in a similar industry, and if it's wise to learn from your mistakes, it's even wiser and less painful to learn from the mistakes of others. Read more »

Print is dead, or so the headlines tell us. The ebook market is growing rapidly and gets lots of good headlines. We’d all like a share of that, but how do you get in? Read more »

Neil Ayres talks us through his experience of trying to get published and why he's developed an iPhone app for his novel New Goodbye. Neil Ayres:  Read more »

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I can report today that Interead the company behind the Cool-er e-reader has been put into liquidation. A petition was made to Liverpool District Court by PR Beam Agency in late March, with the motion granted by a judge on 8th June.

Interead launched a range of Coo-ler Readers in 2009 noted more for their colourful packaging than technical prowess. It also launched an e-book store, which it claimed was the "largest ebookstore in the world"—largely because it offered 1m public domain titles provided by Google. Read more »