FutureBook

"Great news for the UK ebook market: Sainsbury's is our new shareholder!" So said Anobii chief executive Matteo Berlucchi in his tweet this morning announcing that supermarket Sainsbury's had bought a controlling share in the business for £1. Read more »

In amidst the (continuing) Amazon-Devil-Daunt discussion, there has been talk of bundling, as if the desire of consumers to buy two versions of each book they purchase had somehow been proven as fact. Read more »

The Waterstones Amazon deal is long on implication but short on detail. The kernel is that Waterstones is to begin stocking and selling Amazon's Kindle devices, and will allow customers within Waterstones to buy e-book content via a Waterstones wi-fi network that will give those customers an amplified buying experience. Read more »

Two years ago The Bookseller was contacted by a source claiming that publishers were working on a major new initiative aimed at blowing Amazon out of the water. It was known as "Project Z". We followed it up, but the anonymous source became very coy, and then ultimately disappeared off the radar.

There's nothing unusual in this. Not all sources make it into the headlines. Read more »

In digital publishing no sooner do we reach one milestone than another slaps us in the face. The figures released this week by Hachette UK are the first to truly demonstrate the step-change in e-book consumption since the beginning of the year.

Digital sales in the first quarter of 2012 were up 250% on the same period in 2011. E-book sales accounted for 20% of sales of relevant titles and over 30% in the case of certain fiction titles, an average of 25% of adult trade sales. Read more »

Stephen Leather is one of a growing band of authors that have risen to prominence thanks to the e-book. In fact, Leather was the first UK Kindle sensation, having self-published three thrillers digitally—The Basement, Once Bitten and Dreamer’s Cat—over Christmas 2009 in order to take advantage of the expected surge in device ownership. He has since sold more than 350,000 editions of these titles in e-book format. Read more »

The publication of the latest e-book and physical book numbers show how far the publishing industry has gone in a short period of time, where it is going, but sadly not how to get there. The unvarnished truth is that e-books are keeping our heads above water, but the pace of change is also hindering our capacity to swim. Read more »

The headline numbers for the Publishers Association's annual assessment of the UK books marketplace are startling: consumer e-book sales increased by 366% in 2011, amounting to £92m, with consumer e-book sales now equivalent to 6% of the overall consumer book market. Read more »

Microsoft's investment in Barnes & Noble's Nook and college business should not be the huge surprise it clearly is. The giant software business has tried twice to get into the e-book market, and failed on both occasions.

Twelve years ago I attended the first ever Frankfurt E-book Awards, a lavish evening held at the Frankfurt Opera House, which offered six awards worth $10,000 and a grand prize of $100,000. Read more »

Profile Books is re-inventing the 'choose your own adventure' genre for the digital age with the launch this week of Frankenstein, an interactive app based on Mary Shelley's 19th's century horror novel.

The text has been re-written by Dave Morris, who has designed videogames and written role-playing novels, with the app built by inkle, a Cambridge-based software and creative design company. Read more »