The 2014 results are in and Apple’s iMacPad has for the first time dropped out of the top three ebook devices globally. It was a close run thing with readers finally focussing all their attention on pure ebook readers and dropping their use of tablets for books.

[To remove any doubt, and keep the lawyers at bay, what follows is a pure work of fiction. I do not, or have not possessed a time travel device and my psychic powers are not as good as they may appear. However, anything I am proved right on I reserve the right to say ‘I told you so’]. Read more »

The digital trade book business in Europe is booming and unlike US doesn’t show any sign of growth deceleration. In Europe, with perhaps the exception of UK, the weight of digital is still so small that the conventional market friction forces aren’t strong enough to absorb the important momentum tied to the digital book rise. Read more »

The LIA project – Libri Italiani Accessibili (Accessible Italian books) by AIE (Italian Publishers’s Association) aims at creating a service to increase the availability ebooks for blind and visually impaired readers, by exploiting the opportunities offered by technologies. The project promotes a cultural change in the way the publishing value chain actors deal with the issue of accessibility. Read more »

While many were dreaming of the new Kindle Fire and its implications, Apple overnight added 26 New Territories to a list of countries where iBook titles are sold. Significantly, all the added countries are European; meaning texts can be sold via the iBookstore in all EU member states. Read more »

In the past few weeks we have seen a number of announcements coming from James Daunt and the new management team at Waterstones and all of this has been looked at in isolaton. Looking at the bigger picture we begin to see what can be interpreted as Waterstones new strategy or part of it anyway. How much more has to be unveiled will be interesting but what is becoming clear is a distinct repositioning of the UK’s leading book chain. Read more »

Last week an ebook by an author you’ve probably never heard of celebrated one full year in both the Kindle and iBooks bestseller charts, and did so firmly ensconced in the Top 10 of both. Read more »

Philip Stone, charts expert: "Britain's Got Talent" judge Michael McIntyre's memoir, Life and Laughing, second only to Stephen Fry's The Fry Chronicles as the bestselling memoir of 2010, takes top spot in this week's eBestseller list, ahead of Karin Slaughter's The Unremarkable Heart - Random House Group's first direct-to-digitial fiction title. The latter contains the opening chapter of Slaughter's forthcoming Fallen, which hits shelves (both physical and digital) next month. Read more »

Well in the end I was very cordially invited to join the World eReading Congress by the event organisers and help host the opening sessions on Tuesday 10th May with BBC’s Technology Correspondent, Maggie Philbin chairing the event. In fact it was a surreal moment for me to be introduced by Maggie. The event itself cannot be criticised for its lack of scope, quite the opposite really, as the world of digital publishing came together from newspapers, magazines and books. Read more »

The evidence is now irrefutable. Global sales of eBooks rose by approximately 400% in 2010 reaching nearly $1 billion in sales according to Forrester. O'Reilly has revealed that 88 per cent of its unit sales in 2010 were ebooks. In addition, 79 per cent of its dollar revenue was generated by digital versions of its titles. Pearson reported in their 9 months interim statement last October that strong publishing and rapid growth in eBook sales offset tough physical retail markets for Penguin, increasing threefold. Read more »

The digital publishing industry in China is, like the rest of the world still in its infancy.Whilst the Chinese government official statistics claim that for the first time, more digitally published products were sold than physical (by value), it's very difficult to see how these statistics have been reached, especially when Xinhua, the sta Read more »