I'm quoted in the Guardian's piece on Joyland and filesharing today, and on the basis that if you're here at all it's because you're prepared to let me flesh out some ideas, that's what I'm going to do. In the words of George Cyril Wellbeloved: "I expect you're wondering what I think about all this." Read more »

With the rise of Social Media, publishers, authors, journalists and bloggers are jumping on the bandwagon of Facebook and Twitter.

If we were to use the diffusion of innovation framework by Prof. Roger, we could perhaps say that after Innovators and Early Adopters also Early Majority is moving in now. Read more »

The concept of selling direct to consumers (D2C) is, traditionally, alien to most publishers. For centuries, their route to market has been almost exclusively through intermediaries. Then along came digital publishing with a bundle of technologies that gave publishers the opportunity to bypass the intermediaries and sell direct to their readers. This prospect looked interesting. Despite being an industry populated largely by non-technical people, they had recently got to grips with converting their print backlists into digital books. Read more »

Nathan M Farrugia’s recently released debut novel The Chimera Vector has dropped into a sea of digital content at the centre of a global conversation around the future of reading. Read more »

The Arab spring swept across many Arab states and was driven by the confidence that others had succeeded and maybe they weren’t alone. Read more »

This really feels like a watershed moment, doesn't it?  So, briefly...

1) I'm a bit confused - how is watermarking not DRM by another name?

2) How will you enforce anti-piracy sanctions against offenders?  Will you prosecute?  If not, what use is it, really? Read more »

We think that we know everything about the rights that we own, or licence. We attempt to control their usage and licensing and yet find ourselves constantly looking over our shoulders and wary of increased infringement and outright piracy. Read more »

One of the drawbacks with ebooks is that there is no second hand market for them. Unlike physical books you can’t sell a book once you have read it. You can’t even put it on your bookshelf. Read more »

This week we have written a series of short articles titled, ‘2012 Digital Perspectives?’ These have looked at what we believe are the short term issues, challenges, potential game changers and outcomes across the digital publishing value chain. Read more »

2011 has been the year of the App for publishers, no doubt about it, and there were even signs that the enhanced eBook market is worth investing in for the future. But before we get too cross-eyed about what the technology can do by adding whizzes and bangs to the printed word, we would do well to see how the same technology can serve other parts of the business. Read more »