FutureBook

Victoria Barnsley is a very wise person.

That's hardly news to me. Back in the dim and distant past of ebooks - around 2007 or so, when I was first arriving in the world of publishing with a long novel under one arm and a weird sense of homecoming - she was one of the first people whose position on ebooks seemed to chime with the reality I was seeing and my expectations from technology.

So it's not really a surprise that she's making excellent sense again. Read more »

"Ebooks destroying traditional publishing!" Read more »

Amazon bids on frontlist titles

This caught my eye a couple of days ago and I haven't had time to explore it properly. Several things do occur to me, though, and they're worth mentioning even if I don't go into massive detail.

1. Amazon is proposing to become a publisher. That's old news, really, but they've spent a lot of time in the past denying it. Read more »

GBS is over for now; but is the Hargreaves Review the Son-of-GBS? Read more »

The Google Book Settlement (Amended Settlement Agreement) has been rejected.

Since, as you may know, the GBS ate puppies and was directly and singly responsible for Anthropogenic Global Warming, this is a good thing. The world is safe for puppies. (Like the puppy above, which comes to you from the George Eastman House collection and is understood to be free of copyright restrictions.) Read more »

Book Hackday - the place you should be on May 14th.

I mentioned Book Hackday a while ago, but the date wasn't settled. Now it is (May 14th. Did I say that? That's when it is. And did I mention you should go?) and I feel I should emphasise a couple of things. Read more »

Five days ago, I had a slightly random moment...

(No surprise there.)

I had been reading Gormenghast and Gentlemen of the Road, and I'd stumbled on the dictionary definition of Cimmerian, which had made me think of Conan. I'd also been talking to Tom Armitage and Alex Butterworth about collaborative narratives. Read more »

A quick thought from Culture Hack Day... Read more »

At the risk of banging on: at the FutureBook conference last year, I asked the room if anyone believed DRM was effective in reducing piracy. One person was prepared to say they did, but I'm not sure they weren't kidding. Read more »

Yowzer. That was a big, exciting room full of smart people.

You've probably already seen some of the coverage - the hashtag and the write-ups - so I won't belabour those. I'll just tell you what I took home from it (apart from the ever-delightful knowledge that the industry I work in now is just a much better place to be than the one I worked in ten years ago. Oh, my, yes.) Read more »