An illustrated book publisher in search of growth has to look for new outlets and new opportunities. Back in early 2011 – in what might be termed the Paleozoic era of digital publishing – an ad-hoc meeting at the London Book Fair resulting from a daily Bookseller interview proved the catalyst for Amber Books to enter the world of online digital retailing.  Read more »

I was asked to chair a panel at Tools of Change conference last week on Discoverability and it was a theme that emerged time and again across the whole of Frankfurt Book Fair. I thought I’d share the research I did beforehand with links to useful articles.   Read more »

News comes out of New York overnight that Brightline, yet another new publisher, has entered the e-book market. Read more »

One of the advantages of switching from general trade publishing to SMT is that I get to see a whole new side of the publishing world. One of the areas that has caught my specific interest is students. This is, I feel, one of the more interesting groups for publishers to target: they are young, tech savvy, not rich yet and very engaged online. Read more »

Australia and India have joined the UK and the US in leading the world in e-book adoption rates, according to Bowker Market Research’s Global eBook Monitor, with adult fiction the main target of book buyers in the UK and Australia, while in India and South Korea the concentration is on both professional and academic/textbooks. Read more »

Germany’s first ebook subscription service has been launched. Read more »

In the jostle for market share in the tablet space Amazon is betting it will sell a great deal of content through the Kindle Fire as unlike its fierce competitor Apple it does not make money on its hardware sales. Read more »

The Huffington Post reports that US Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski have challenged schools and publishers to make the conversion to digital textbooks within five years. Now, on one level, this is straightforward enough - most educational publishers can do this now and already are, to some extent. But the elephant in the room is what they mean by 'digital textbook'. Read more »

One thing became apparent during the Futurebook Conference rather quickly: it has become painfully clear that publishers should be looking at the consumers as their main customers, in stead of retailers. The erosion of the retail-based model of the book universe has been going on for some years, fuelled by the online retail revolution and the changing consumer behavior that came with it. Digital publishing has only further hastened the process. Read more »

As readers of this blog will no doubt be aware there are massive changes happening in the way that we interact with traditional book content. High consumer expectations of digital reading came from Apple and then Android Apps. Apps have meant that readers and publishers no longer simply thought just about text and images but came to expect greater functionality and interactivity from content. However the main issue with Apps was how expensive they were to produce. But the recent announcement from Apple that iBooks 1.5 now supports Javascript is set to change all that. Read more »