FutureBook

App review: The Doctor Who Encyclopedia (BBC Books and Brandwidth; iPad only)

The wheezing, groaning TARDIS take-off sound that greets the user on launching this app bodes well for its contents, and the Doctor Who Encyclopedia doesn’t disappoint. Read more »

With the release of their Cloud Reader browser app for Kindle, Amazon has become the first of the major booksellers to respond to Apple's recent enforcement of its rules on in-app purchase with an attractive browser-based alternative. Read more »

Is publishing a vast, slow-moving tanker that will take some time to turn around? Or rather a fishing boat seeking out “blue oceans” where the fish have not yet all been caught? Read more »

Amber Books' latest app, following swiftly on the heels of its well-received D-Day: 1944, is an interesting example of the growing genre of "coffee-table apps". Like their print equivalents, coffee-table apps tend to be light and entertaining, designed to be dipped into as and when the user fancies; unlike print, however, they can bring in multimedia to add to the experience. Read more »

With Google’s interest in ebooks apparently on the wane, might successful e-publishers step into the breach? Read more »

Last week's ePublishing Innovation Forum may have been aimed at the “information industry”, but the issues addressed often applied across the entire publishing sector. Read more »

In its print form, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad last month deservedly won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It has also now been published as an app by Constable & Robinson. Read more »

On the eve of the second Futurebook conference, a comparison with its predecessor shows how rapidly the industry is developing... Read more »

One of the most in-demand events at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair was Friday’s round-table discussion: The eBook Business: Who’s in Control? Entry was so carefully restricted that even panel member Victoria Barnsley, Chief Executive of HarperCollins, struggled at first to make her way past security and into the venue. Read more »

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 »