FutureBook

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 »

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 »

Sunday's London Book Fair Digital Conference was marked by an optimism about the prospects for the industry. George Lossius from Publishing Technology set the tone early on. Dedicated e-readers, he suggested, merely allowed publishers to sustain existing revenues, but mobile offered an opportunity to increase them. Not only do mobile phones have mass ownership, but – most importantly – users appear to be far more willing to pay for content on their phones than on their computers. Read more »