FutureBook

People, it's time, and past time. Read more »

Does the Agency Pricing issue make your brain hurt?

Fear not. Help is at hand. Wired/Tim Carmody's piece on what's at stake and how it all works (or doesn't) in a legal sense is today's must read for all in the book trade. Includes:

definition of hub-and-spoke conspiracy (bad)

definition of conscious parallelism (good)

and some really powerful and interesting points about the legal ramifications of the court accepting the model. 

Go. Learn.

Here.

About ten seconds ago, I said something so stupid and simple that it may be a bit clever.

So I leaped from my metaphorical bath - over on the right there --> - to come here and say it out loud, because what every serious business-specific community site for the discussion of serious issues needs is a dripping writer shouting about the future while his towel slips perilously and the cat runs for the safety of the sofa.

Metaphorically, I swear. Read more »

There's a typically furious piece over at The Register this morning about education and copyright. Read more »

Long ago and far away, one of my teachers suggested that my brain was proof of Brownian Motion.

So I move through the social media world pinging off things and bouncing all over the place without much in the way of a plan. I know what my plan ought to be, I just don't actually have one. Read more »

"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

It's true, it really does. And I don't know if you've ever used a walkie-talkie, but for the first few minutes you talk as if you're in an old Anthony Hopkins action flick. It's all "roger roger" and "Alpha foxtrot, I did not copy, over" and then you settle down and say "sorry, mate, what was that?" Read more »

Pan Macmillan have produced a gorgeous website. [click]

It is, conceptually, something I'm incredibly delighted to see. It is a pretty, consumer-focused place to buy books. It has cool stuff, looks attractive (well, in my browser: rumour has it that it resembles a fruit salad in Chrome, but okay, it's early days) and will sell you things. It's simple and clean. It has a strong feel, a sense of identity.

Okay, rock and roll! Read more »

It's the crazy season for me, with my new novel coming out in February here in the UK and March in the US, closely followed by my first non-fiction book (it's FutureBook-relevant, actually, being about digitisation and society etc )in May. 

But this crazy season has introduced me to a new form of angst: the e-short. I've got an 11k word short selling through Amazon, Apple, and Kobo. Aside from the fact that I find this mysteriously scary in some indefinable new way I can't my finger on, it has introduced me to a bright, shiny, unfamiliar mode of stress. Read more »

This is how people feel about paper books. It's worth remembering, as we talk about digital, that the physical world exerts a grip on us - as it should - which exists at a very basic level in who we are. And books, which combine the physical or the immediate and the cognitive, are liminal things which command the attention of both parts of our selves.

Sermon over. Watch the video. With props to Sam, who saw it first.

I was on a plane.

So, while you wretched lot were boozing it up at the FutureBook Conference, listening to Charlie Redmayne tell you true things about branding and all kinds of other coolness, I was doing a seven and a half hour prison sentence with a furious fifteen month old and a vast quantity of projectile humous. You lucky lucky lucky lucky lucky people. Read more »