Friday, June 29, 2007

YouTube versus MySpace, Place your bets

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Video wars again but not betamax versus VHS but Google’s YouTube versus Murdoch’s MySpace. MySpace have taken the gloves off and recognised ...

Taylor and Francis Continue to Grow Digitally

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Whilst many edge their bets and make much noise, some take action. Both strategies may be right, but it is interesting to see the continued ...
Wednesday, June 27, 2007

We know where you all are!

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Imagine a birds eye view of traffic across the Uk and not only can you see the congestion areas but you know the speed of all the vehicles. ...

BBC iPlayer launches into the iWorld

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The BBC enters the "iWorld" with a beta version of its on-demand TV service, iPlayer on 27 July. It will be only available to UK ...

One Day to go to Lift off!!

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Forget Harry Potter there will always be crazes and next year there will be another. Live live the King! Its now only hours to the biggest a...
Monday, June 25, 2007

Espresso Books come to the New York Library

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It may appear to be a long way off from setting up shop next to more traditional vending machines,or the local bookstore but those in New Yo...

Bowker aquire Medialab Solutions

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R.R. Bowker, the bibliographic information management company, has announced that it has acquired Medialab Solutions by Amsterdam. Medialab ...

Four days to a New World

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On Friday it happens! The iPhone launches in the US and is set to be a landmark shift in the convergence of technology, content and design. ...
Thursday, June 21, 2007

Capture them Young

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Scholastic is launching BookFlix, an educational Web site pairing short films based on popular picture books along with nonfiction e-books t...

Second Life of a Book

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The Russian delegation at the IBF conference last week in Cape Town raised a few eyebrows with their latest book buying scheme. It certainly...

The Cape of Hope

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The Cape Town Book Fair was certainly different. The aisles were jammed packed with people but not just the trade but ordinary people who ha...

Internet Penertration and use in the Devloping World

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The following is an extract from a speech I gave at the IBF (International Booksellers Conference) in Cape Town last week. It relates to the...
Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Browse this Space

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This week Steve Jobs announced that Apple would make its Safari Web browser available for Windows based PCs. The gloves are coming off all o...

Skype to Go

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Skype has unveiled Skype To Go, a new way to call anyone worldwide. As part of the global roll-out of Skype Pro, users can talk to their bes...

Used Books and Stars for All

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Used books have always been here but the Internet is simply make them more available. First came ABE and Alibris, then Amazon and now eBay. ...

Are Amazon going to be Riding the Bullet?

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Newspapers and magazines have always provided publishers with opportunities to get their titles reviewed or serialised and into the public e...
Monday, June 11, 2007

Stealing versus Search

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An interesting Blog from those great book bloggers Booksquare http://www.booksquare.com Stealing vs. Search - The Difference Now don’t get u...

Potter versus iPhone

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Forget Harry Potter’s latest adventure and June 21st there is something potentially far larger happening later in the month. After six month...
Sunday, June 10, 2007

Suits You Sir!

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Nice threads sir! Marks and Spencer have now created the suit for the man with everything! A suit made from a fabric that transforms the ins...

Classic Audio, Read by Class Acts at Great Prices

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Silksoundbooks.com have launched a new digital download venture with 60 titles and expects to have 1,000 within three years. There are sever...
Thursday, June 07, 2007

DIY wiki archives

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The National Archives has launched a ‘wiki based’ site to help access its huge materials that spans 900 years from the Doomsday Book to toda...

Beware the Google hover cometh

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If you can’t get all the content from the publishers why not get 10 million books from the universities and libraries? Today we hear that Go...
Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Letter from America

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The BEA lived up to its reputation for creating lots of news and the digital word was certainly hot on most people’s lips. So what caught th...

Radio Ad Times

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eBay has said it would begin selling radio airtime to advertisers this week through a partnership with Bid4Spots. It will offer advertisers ...
Thursday, May 31, 2007

Sign of the times

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“Are you watching I am on the screen over here? Now what is your name ?” Next the pen writes and signs the book and your favourite author ha...

Amazon to provide 'lightening' service on POD

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Amazon Booksurge subsidiary has announced agreements with major publishers including; HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, Pe...
Friday, May 25, 2007

The Cat's out of the Bag

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Following on from our blog earlier this week there is now lots of fresh noise around rights reversals. This classic quote from the Bookselle...
Thursday, May 24, 2007

Facebook Leaps Forth

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At a time when all marketing eyes are either watching the move by the search engines into traditional advertising space or experimenting wit...

Amazon Buys Brilliance

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Amazon has acquired Michigan audiobook publisher Brilliance who have a catalogue of over 1,000 audio titles and releases 20 to 40 new titles...
Wednesday, May 23, 2007

DK travel to create 'My Guide'

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We all said that travel would be one of the first trade genre to move at speed into the digital era and further evidence of this was seen th...
Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Who's Copyright is it?

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Today we read from the excellent Booksquare blog http://www.booksquare.com about Simon and Schuster’s approach to changing the rules about r...
Monday, May 21, 2007

So where do you advertse?

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An interesting article from Gavin O’Reilly in the Independent last week. He argues that far from the death of newsprint the industry is seei...

Place your bets on the next best seller

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So its official publishing is a gambling business and spread betting is real. A very well respected consultant James Lichtenberg who I once ...
Saturday, May 19, 2007

The Goose has laid its Golden Egg

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According to the latest Internet sales statistics from Interactive Media in Retail Group last months sales rose 55% on last year to hit £3.4...

Health Warning as Internet Advertising is Bought-up

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In the struggle for advantage in the digital advertising boom the search engines are buying up online advertising companies, sometimes for e...
Thursday, May 17, 2007

Winalot, Walkies and Maps

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Having spent some very interesting time at the Ordnance Survey partner conference it was alarming how little one knew about the world of map...
Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Slushpile.com

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We read today about the The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks"-books based on blogs or...
Sunday, May 13, 2007

Joost in Time TV

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We have reported before on the new breed to TV services spearheaded by Joost from that innovative team that first created Kazaa and Skype. J...
Saturday, May 12, 2007

Thomson Education Sold

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The long awaited and much talked about sale of Thompson’s educational business has been concluded. Apax Partners, a private equity group, an...

iPod News with a Difference

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MacNewsWorld threw up two interesting articles on that fashion icon this week. Invasion of the Killer iPods? First there is the question of ...
Friday, May 11, 2007

Video killed the radio star?

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When Mike Batt wrote the words to the hit song he certainly did envisage to success of digital radio. Listening figures for the first quarte...

Advertise to your friends on Facebook

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Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder Facebook, the social networking Web site, which has 22 million active users, has announced that it is ad...

Google has three legs

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Speaking at the annual shareholder meeting on Thursday, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive, of Google stated that their business was organ...

The World according to Bill

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The prophet came down from the mountain at Microsoft's Strategic Account Summit in Seattle. Of course there were tablets (digital) and t...
Thursday, May 10, 2007

Life on Earth

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An ambitious internet Encyclopedia of Life was announced yesterday which will list information on all the 1.8m known species of animals, pla...

Publishing by Installment

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Remember Stephen King’s ‘Riding the Bullit’. The story was released in installments, chapter by chapter for download over the Internet. Some...
Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Reaching out to consumers

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We now have books being promoted to consumers! Sounds logical and many will say that has always been the case but the cynic would point to t...

Another Media Format says Farewell

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After vinyl came the short lived eight-track but neither could compete with the cassette. Perfected by Philips and effectively given away by...
Thursday, May 03, 2007

The Introduction of the Book

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There is no way we should go forward without looking back at leasons learnt. I hope this amusing clip gives you both fun and thoughts about ...
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 ...