A while ago I stumbled on this post from Eric Hellman exploring the question of what sort of front- and endmatter makes sense for e-books, given that many of the pages that we see in the front of paper books have a purpose related to the printing process. Hellman gives the example of the bastard or half-title page:  Read more »

I'll be honest, when I saw tweets yesterday mentioning a book from 'Kindle insider' Jason Merkoski I was rather excited. The initial interview on the New York Times' blog offered plenty of tantalising quotes. Read more »

In the run up to the IATEFL conference this week, held in Liverpool, I though it would be relevant to write a blog about the state of the English Language Teaching market for digital textbooks and resources.  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 »

What a tangle: Amazon has received a patent for a system for selling “pre-owned” digital files, opening the way for a secondary market in ebooks - and putting the electronic cat amongst the analogue pigeons. Read more »

The Spanish book industry in general and the media in particular are focusing almost exclusively on aspects of digitization that have to do with the sale of digital content (e-books). However, there is a wide range of options for using the opportunities offered by technology to support the promotion and sale of more physical books, which currently represent around 98% of the Spanish market, with ebooks currently at only 2%. Read more »

For the first time this year, our Digital Census survey asked specific questions of authors. Yes, authors, like they’re important. Huh? Read more »

Swimming (or sinking) in a new world owned by device-manufacturers (who are, not coincidentally, store owners), publishers oft comfort themselves with the idea that the old will co-exist with the new somehow. Who knows, perhaps it will, but for a moment let's test the strength of the logic on which the most commonly advanced co-existence arguments are based, including this beautifully illustrated infographic from Mashable via Ilex. Read more »

Introduction

At Tools of Change – Frankfurt last week, I and Dan Rhatigan did a talk on design and typography in e-reading. Read more »

DISCORDIA – words by Laurie Penny, illustrations by Molly Crabapple – is out worldwide today. For me it’s a key milestone in one line of publishing that I’ve been concentrating on since I joined Random House at the start of 2011. Read more »