I’ve spent the last two and one-half days with about 1500 of my closest friends at Digital Book World 2012, this week’s entry into the publishing conference sweepstakes. The conference has grown tremendously in terms of attendance, number of sponsors and breadth of programming over its three-year life and along with some very good speakers and panels, provides an excellent networking opportunity. (Disclosure: I’m a conference junkie and this is one of eight or ten I’ll attend this year. Read more »

As Digital Book World -- the first of the two big post-Christmas US e-book conferences -- opens, last week's education announcement by Apple shows how easy it is now for any of the big digital companies to hijack the publishing conversation. Read more »

So, Apple's big disruption of the entire educational publishing business turns out to be [drumroll]:

• iBooks2
• iBooks Author, and
• iTunes U courseware.

Yesterday, I was worried about what Apple were going to do. Not paranoid - Apple don't create content, which is what we consider our most valuable asset - but worried. Now, though? Not so much. Read more »

The human body has always been one of DK's bestselling subjects. Our most recent success, The Human Body Book, has sold over 1.2m copies worldwide.  So when we set about producing the Human Body app we knew it needed to be every bit as informative and beautiful as the book but with rich new layers of accessibility and interactivity. Because of the scale and complexity of the project – 11 body systems, 46 chapters, 99 stories and 100s of images – we looked for a technical and design partner to work with us. Read more »