So that's it then. The gigs up.

What I’ve been passing off as Witchcraft and High Magick to grateful publishers for the last 10 years has been unmasked as simply taking advantage of perfectly predictable consumer behaviour, a working knowledge of Google and a sprinkling of common sense.

Dammit. Ah well, it was good while it lasted.  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 »

You might not know it yet but January 10th 2012 was a big day for the internet and everyone who accesses information through Google.
 
January 10th was the day that Google introduced* what they are calling Google Search Plus Your World (which most commentators are now referring to simply as Social Search).
  Read more »

News reaches our shores that "The love affair with apps is officially over". This is the conclusion drawn by Forrester and Digital Book World and presented at their New York conference by James McQuivey. Read more »

Thought it might be useful to see all of the big digital stories of 2011 as a timeline. It really has been an extraordinary year. My next blog will be your predictions for 2012. If you haven't let me know yet, then tweet me.   

January

Ebook sales in US comprised 23.5% of all trade book sales in January. 

February Read more »

'We've become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organise, instantly access, and share vast amounts of cultural data.' Simon Reynolds, Retromania

‘I’m bringing sexy back.’ Justin Timberlake Read more »

The Google Book Settlement (Amended Settlement Agreement) has been rejected.

Since, as you may know, the GBS ate puppies and was directly and singly responsible for Anthropogenic Global Warming, this is a good thing. The world is safe for puppies. (Like the puppy above, which comes to you from the George Eastman House collection and is understood to be free of copyright restrictions.) Read more »

This weekend I came across an interesting observation from 2002 by Alistair McCleery, concerning ‘the general erasure of the human from book history’, being: Read more »

Building on the success of our previous digital publishing conferences, The Bookseller will be holding its Futurebook conference on November 30th in London.  Read more »

There has been so much excitement about the iPad as an ereading device that it is easy to forget what it is really good at: the internet. And this could be a problem for the book trade because it may just hand the keys to the digital books future to Google. Read more »