I'd like to announce this year's industry research: which aims to find out the current position of the trade with regards to digital (and a few predictions). Read more »

There's something exciting - and reassuring - about publishers using terms such as ‘hackathon' and ‘open-source': everyone knows they have the content but releasing it wild into a environment they may not be able to fully control can be difficult. It seems to be in this spirit that Pearson has embraced an open-source approach to digital content, making its proprietary content available to third-party dig Read more »

If you are looking to book onto FutureBook 2011 conference, click here. The Bookseller’s FutureBook 2011 conference will be happening on 5th December in London. It is my job to deliver the best digital publishing conference possible. No mean feat. I am fully aware that competition has increased and the discussion has intensified since last year. Read more »

Few can argue with the proposition in the government’s response to the Hargreaves Report that enabling medical and scientific research is a good thing, both for social and economic reasons. What is more controversial, however, is how this should be achieved, and what the implications will actually be in practice. Read more »

So why has Facebook bought Push Pop Press?The NYT thinks this could signal Facebook entering digital books and argues, Read more »

I think all creative businesses should be asking themselves: should my core medium be the focus of my business, or should I be developing and exploiting my creative content in several media? And assuming the answer is yes, they should then ask how do I go about taking my content and brand into a new medium? It is a question being asked by TV production companies, magazine publishers and record labels as much as by book publishers. Read more »

By now everyone knows about innovation clusters. It goes something like this: people start doing interesting things, they achieve some success, so more people come to hang around, spin out of them, bolt on, get inspired and go beyond them, and they in turn achieve some success, and the process continues and keeps building and before you know it, boom, you’ve got Silicon Valley.
The lesson is that innovation breeds innovation, that proximity is important to spreading ideas and that clusters of talent, competition, investment and know-how are the motors behind productive change. Read more »

2003 was an incredible year for licensed publishing—and terrific for Penguin. It was the year of Finding Nemo. The Disney/Pixar film catapulted tie-in books into the top of the children’s charts worldwide. Penguin’s records were broken again in 2008 when In the Night Garden books had their debut. But times are quickly changing. Read more »

Today we are running FutureBook's Innovation Workshop, in association with my own website The Literary Platform.

It’s been an extraordinary year for book publishers. Every day we seem to witness a new twist or turn of events – many are calling it the Wild West and you can understand why – as these are challenging times for publishers. Read more »

With Faber's lastest app The Waste Land gaining plaudits all over (see below, here, here, and here), and in the week of the FutureBook Innovation Workshop --which will gather Read more »