Textr Beagle enters the ebook reader market with an £8 device, Kindle has a gorgeous new version, Nook comes to the UK. Is that the last death throes of the paperback we hear? Nah. Read more »

There are many good reasons for hoping Barnes & Noble has a successful launch of its Nook devices and UK shop, but the news last week that this roll-out has been delayed by two weeks does not augur well. It was Profile's Michael Bhaskar who said back in August that the company needed to make a "big splash", and one hopes that it still can. Read more »

I was asked to chair a panel at Tools of Change conference last week on Discoverability and it was a theme that emerged time and again across the whole of Frankfurt Book Fair. I thought I’d share the research I did beforehand with links to useful articles.   Read more »

Much is written about "marketing on a budget", but more often than not it seems that the advice is still despenced by those whose concept of 'limited' is somewhat inflated. Ilex, however, have come up with a novel and exciting idea which can be implemented for very little indeed – potentially hardware you already have in the office – the online book launch. Read more »

Ecosystems and the discoverability gap have been the main themes running through the two pre-Frankfurt digital conferences, Publishers Launch and TOC, with how publishers add value, pricing, piracy, and inevitably DRM not too far behind.
Concerns over the big tech players and their customer lock-in strategies were aired at Publishers Launch, where we learned that Amazon's market share of a customer's book purchases trebles once that customer acquires a Kindle (a worrying stat for Waterstones). 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 »

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 »