Thursday, April 26, 2007

Amazon is becoming a Gorilla

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For the last ten years everyone has been putting Amazon down, at first they would be wiped out, then could service their debt, then they wer...

Karaoke on the move?

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Song lyrics will some be available for all for free. Yahoo has announced a service which will include the lyrics to 400,000 songs by 9,000 a...

We are all getting connected

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I am sitting in our Value Chain office in Bangalore and I am greeted by today’s headlines in ‘The Economic Times’ of India – ‘Broadband to g...

Communities and aggregation is the name of the digital game

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Since 2005, all NHS staff and students in Greater Manchester have been able to access 30,000 books and reports in 28 NHS libraries and are n...

Now you see it, then you don’t

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So you want to see the parts that other maps don’t show you? The Ordinance Survey may have omitted 16,000 square kilometres of military war...
Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Amazon to download….

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No sooner has Steve Jobs left stage left having announced the deal to sell digital downloads without DRM protection, than Jeff Bezos enters ...

Latte and a Book to Go

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When we talk about the demise of the independent bookstore we see many reasons. As we stated yesterday change happens and with every opportu...
Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Independent Bookshops 'must …'

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Advice to independent bookstores is offered by everyone. There is the collective approach offered by Stephen Poulter, owner of Books@Hoddesd...

The BBC plans to show repeats on demand

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When you flick the channel hopper and find those hidden shows of yesterday you often realise many were not as good as you fondly remembered....

Where were you when the Blackberries Stopped?

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There will be conversations all over the US about the nights the lights went. No not the New York black out but the service outage suffered ...

Mobiles continue to offer Digital Content

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That ubiquitous mobile continues to attract different publishers as they experiment with digital delivery. Hundreds of travel books and maps...
Monday, April 16, 2007

The Patent Office Rebrands

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The Patent office is about to become the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO) and in doing so will harmonise the policing of IP infringe...

JICS Athens and authentication

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The joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has announced that it ceasing it funding of Athens authentication from July 2008. Athens has ...
Thursday, April 12, 2007

Gardners announces the creation of a new ‘Digital Warehouse’

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Press Release - Thursday 12th April 2007 Gardners Books is pleased to announce the creation of a new ‘Digital Warehouse’ designed to provide...
Monday, April 02, 2007

The DRM cat is out of the Bag!!

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EMI announced today that it is taking the software restrictions off some of its digital music songs sold via download sites and selling the...

Apple and EMI to announce...

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EMI and Apple are planning a joint press announcement today. Speculation is rife as to what it will be but given their recent debates over a...
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Keep it Simple

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Take a simple teenage problem, ‘how do I share my music with my friends without getting tangled up in cables or blastling everyone with the ...

The World just got Smaller and Faster

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IBM researchers have demonstrated a prototype optical transceiver chipset that will potentially open up all content to be downloaded. The te...

When is a Contenext Link not a Context Link?

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Have you ever tried to set up an associate site or sell via marketplace? Just when you thought you had it cracked along came their ‘widget’...
Saturday, March 24, 2007

Apples are good for you?

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Has the iPhone positioned Apple as the must have product provider even before it has hit the streets? They now have Apple TV, iTunes, the iP...
Friday, March 23, 2007

CRAZE-Y Publishing

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Some commentators in Victorian England thought that the craze for bicycling would spell the end for books and reading. Then others thought t...
Wednesday, March 21, 2007

i am not OLD!!!!

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What does the aged, or the infirm, or the visually impaired want form a mobile phone? The new Life phone believe that it is the answer. It ...

MySpace or MurdochSpace

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MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation and is the Internet’s largest social network, has been introducing limits on the software to...

Digital Publishing is Publishing

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We hear of the latest salvo in the battle of the omnivores versus publishers in today’s Telegraph. The report states that publishers are con...
Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Open-Source Wiki-Search

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Can we ever envisage anyone threatening Google’s position and dominance of the search engine market? It is like asking if anyone can serious...

BBC Jam is taken off the table

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The BBC Trust is to pull its £150m online educational service BBC Jam from 20th March. This is not down to cost, nor it being acceptable to ...
Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Selective History

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We automatically assume that the digital vacuum cleaners will hoover all archives before them and we will capture history in its entirety. T...
Friday, March 09, 2007

Books can be an Investment

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We hear so much about the death of the book in paper but today we read about the rare book sale of all sales. The prices achieved at Duke’s ...
Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Life’s a Pitch – Is this a Typo?

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Today we read from New Media Age about ‘Life’s a Pitch’ a new business book published by Random House. The news is that the first chapter of...
Tuesday, March 06, 2007

eBay Changes

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The following is an extract reproduced with permission from an excellent newsletter ‘Shephard’s Confidential’ www.shephardsworld.co.uk and a...

Microsoft Versus Google - Let Battle Begin

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Copyright is no becoming the battleground on which the omnivores will do battle. In the blue corner we have MSN who true to their colour are...

How Much Can We Byte Off?

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If you can remember the opening of the original motorways you will probably picture a scene looking down onto a dual carriageway, was broadc...
Friday, March 02, 2007

Podcasting DIY

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The economies of scale and reach provided within the physical supply chain do not apply in the digital world. We all need to recognise that ...
Thursday, March 01, 2007

Amazon gets Their Space

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Today we hear that Amazon has invested the book social networking website Shelfari. It hardly ironic that Shelfari is based in Seattle, home...
Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Wigets Multiply Overnight

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Predicting some things is easy. Only one day after HarperCollins announced their ‘Browse inside’ facility, Random House announced their ‘Ins...

iPods in the Classroom

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Last week we spoke about some of the wide range of uses the ubiquitous iPod is being put to. In 2004, Duke University in the US gave all st...
Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Kazza, Skype and now Joost

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There are two people who more than most helped shape the Internet ‘free’ world we live in today. It was definitely not Jobs and Gates or tho...

Guardian and Bebo promote Nanotales

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Guardian Unlimited and Bebo.com have joined forces to launch a new literary competition that will encourages users to write their own "...

Searching Just got Smarter

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As a result of the emergence of video-sharing, user-generated video, free digital storage, mobile videos and broadband, the volume of videos...

Pirates and Hollywood Join Forces!

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BitTorrent, the file sharing tool we discussed last week is used by many to illegally share files on the Internet has just come in from the ...
Monday, February 26, 2007

Short, Back and Insides- Bibliographic just got richer

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The world of bibliographic just went up a notch with the announcement from HarperCollins that it has enabled its Browse Inside feature so it...
Friday, February 23, 2007

Who owns MP3 Intellectual Property?

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Yesterday Microsoft was ordered by the Federal District Court in San Diego jury to pay $1.52 billion in a patent dispute over the MP3 format...

An Interesting Insight to City Thinking

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It was very interesting to read the speculative report this week that made a case for combining Barnes and Noble and Borders. In this world ...

Come Fly With Me

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That iPod we only talked about this week has now found its way into the cockpit of small planes and is about to become a flight data recorde...
Wednesday, February 21, 2007

iPods enter the danger zones

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The iPod now is being used to help communication in the war zone that is Iraq, whilst at the same time some are declaring war on the use of ...

So why isn't everyone on Skype?

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When eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005, many thought it a wise move. But how would they make money from free VOIP (voice over Inter...
Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Is Open ID safe?

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Imagine not having to remeber different passwords for the numerous services you access over the Internet. Is it safe to use the same passwor...
Sunday, February 18, 2007

Piracy on the Digital Highway

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When Steve Jobs threw down the gauntlet to the music producers and suggested removing prohibitive and unfriendly DRM, he was certainly openi...
Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Open Access - Who Pays?

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The thorny issue of ‘open access’ was raised again in an article today in the Guardian. This is not an issue that is going away, nor is it ...
Monday, February 12, 2007

Music Wars

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Has Apple and its iTunes an unsustainable position with their 70% market share? Many would suggest that they are so far ahead of the pack it...
Thursday, February 08, 2007

Apples are good for you?

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Ok imagine that you are sitting on top of the market, selling 70% of the legal music downloads, some 2 million songs since launching in 2003...
Tuesday, February 06, 2007

This book can get excited!

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Polymer Vision, a Phillips spin-off appears to be making fast work of bring its new screen technology to market this year. We have already r...
Monday, February 05, 2007

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Print

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Those opportunities to make a change are rare and often few and far between. Imagine Stephen King’s ‘Riding the bullet’ today, would it make...
Sunday, February 04, 2007

Can you hear me, Mother?

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We argued in “Brave New World” that the audio book would lead the digital revolution. The consumer experience was the same, MP3 technology w...

Pick up a Penguin

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I recently watched TV programme which showed a colony of penguins ritually landing on an obscure Antarctica bay. They were driven ashore in ...
Friday, February 02, 2007

Hi Ho Silver Lining

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The silver surfers have arrived. In our report “Brave New World” we recognised the potential of this group, pensioners with time, potentiall...

ebookstork

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My thoughts and best wishes go out to a proud new father and his new born baby. I can see him rushing frantically around the room at those p...
Thursday, February 01, 2007

Describing things better may be more important than the thing itself

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Everyone is finding out the power of metadata. A photo that has no description is merely a picture and on the web, the picture is literally ...

Print Just in Case

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Years ago, I remember sitting around the office’s of PIRA (Print Industry Research Ass) with a number of major publishers. The objective was...