Over the last few months I’ve been preparing the launch of my ebook publishing experiment and taking notes on the process.

Studio Tendra, the first publishing experiment itself was launched a couple of weeks ago and, Heartpunk, the first book series, is off on a good start.

The first issue became obvious very early on and my experience over the first few weeks confirms it: existing ebook publishing platforms are a joke. Read more »

SourceBooks, the innovative US publisher, is claiming to have mastered the enhanced e-book problem— whereby publishers spend too much money amplifying digital books in ways the reader does not want—by coming up with a range of iBooks based on William Shakespeare's plays: the nicely titled Shakespearience. 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 »

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

The Price War has begun (again) and ebook prices for some titles are approaching nothing. Read more »

The Publishers Association's half-year e-book numbers show fiction e-book sales up 188% over 2011, helping to contribute to a market that seems remarkably robust. Read more »

Orion is to grow its range of community based genre websites with the launch of The Murder Room for readers of crime fiction. It follows the publisher’s success with the SF Gateway, a community site for fans of science fiction that went live a year ago, and which is now to be upgraded. SF Gateway has attracted 27,000 unique visitors over the first 12 months, with e-books featured on the site generating 5% of Orion’s digital revenue in its first year. Read more »

According to AIE (the Italian Publishers Association), in Italy e-books represent 4.4% of all the titles published, accounting for a total of 13 million Euro in 2011. This data, presented at the 2012 edition of the Turin International Book Fair, seems encouraging, but the e-book sales revenue is still only the 1% of the total of trade turnover. Read more »

All eyes will surely be on e-book prices now following the decision last week by Judge Cote to wave through the settlement agreements in the US between the Department of Justice and Hachette Book Group USA, Simon & Schuster Inc, and HarperCollins US. Harper US has already struck new deals with retailers, and as a consequence many of its e-book titles are now being discounted on e-bookseller sites. Read more »

It is the beginning of September and in bookshops, shelves are near collapsing under the sheer weight of future best-sellers. Of over four hundred books published, only a dozen will actually be successful. Read more »