Thursday, November 29, 2007

Broadband Can Get 200 Times Faster

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The barriers to high bandwidth start to tumble with the announcement that a PhD student in Melbourne has developed technology to increase b...
Wednesday, November 28, 2007

EInk to go Colour

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The current e-readers such as Sony and the Kindle are not unlike the initial print on demand services - only available in black. However E-...

Open US Mobile Market

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The biggest disappointments this year was not that England didn’t make the soccer European Finals or that they didn’t win the rugby World Cu...

Glass Half Empty or Full?

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On the back of the announcement from Picador the press vultures are now signalling the death of the hardback. There are three issues; use, ...
Friday, November 23, 2007

Is 'Free to Consumer' the New Model?

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Free is becoming a new business model that is causing many established players in many media sectors to rethink life. The music sector certa...
Thursday, November 22, 2007

Mixed Music Messages - But What's New

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According to the UK industry trade association, the BPI, and the Official Charts Company the 150 millionth download was sold last week. This...

Does Digital = Wild West?

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Ok Amazon creates an ebook reader to sell digital book and its now followed by Dymocks in Australia who have launched a website with 120,000...

The 40% Broadband Challenge

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The Uk has established a clear divide between the connected and the unconnected this divide shows little sign of change according to informa...

Book Videos need to introduce Sizzle

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BookVideos.tv and now includes titles from, Bantam Dell, Chronicle, Hachette Book Group, MacMillan, Thomas Nelson and W.W. Norton as well as...

Where do library books go for Winter?

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We wrote in October in our blog about ‘Library Dumps Books’ which referred to Wiltshire County Council, decision to send hundreds of libra...
Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Kindle Thoughts

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So we now have the Amazon Kindle and Bezos has at last put his own personal ‘Midas touch’ behind the ebook. Does this mean we have an ‘Oprah...
Monday, November 19, 2007

The News from Barnsley

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Today’s news will be disheartening to many booksellers and yet is a step forward to understanding tomorrow’s world. There are three items we...
Friday, November 16, 2007

Ask.com gets smart over music

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Every now and again you stumble onto a web site and experience a Wow factor and forget to add it to favourites and spend ages try to find it...
Thursday, November 15, 2007

Brave New World; Chapter 2

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News is often binary in that it is either good, or bad. Today as we celebrate bringing you our good news - our 250th blog, last night there...
Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Wall Street Journal to be Free Online

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Rupert Murdoch today confirmed that he is planning to drop subscription fees for the digital version of the Wall Street Journal. The plan as...

An Alternative to Trees?

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We talk about eco friendly paper and saving trees and were somewhat taken aback to discover an alternative via Vision Paper (www.visionpaper...

New York to Collect Affiliate Tax

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Ok you operate out of New York but list books internet retailer affiliate under ABE, Amazon etc. Sounds familiar and has been very successfu...
Tuesday, November 13, 2007

The Publishers' Benchmark

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A new publisher’s Forum has been launched by that dynamic publisher Emma Barnes of Snowbooks. First she gave us her Second Life experience n...

No Exclusive iPhone Deal at HarperCollins

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Last Friday we followed up on a page 3 news piece from ‘The Bookseller ‘ 9th November, 2007 that stated ‘HC in exclusive iPhone Deal’. We cl...

Rough Guides to...

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Following on from the acquisition of Lonely Planet by BBC Worldwide, Rough Guides has tied-up with TV broadcaster Channel Five to air a seri...
Monday, November 12, 2007

DRM is not the People's Choice

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U.K. music download store, 7 Digital, reports that its DRM-free music downloads are outselling other formats by a factor of four to one. Giv...
Friday, November 09, 2007

Is it Wise?

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The Iphone launches in the UK today and HarperCollins has announced that it has signed an exclusive deal with Apple to provide free book con...
Thursday, November 08, 2007

Jammin

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It would appear that the world of James Bond is available to all. The array of devices may not all be a sophisticated as Q’s but the range i...

Book TV Forget it?

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We were very interested to read Daniel Kalder’s article in yesterday’s Guardian Unlimited, ‘Literary TV to put you off reading forever’. Any...

Keep on Running

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This year 38,000 runners started the New York marathon. The press may have focused on the achievements of Paula Radcliffe and other front ru...
Friday, November 02, 2007

Author Connect

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We have seen author videos and heard their podcasts. The sometimes work and sometimes don’t but they should all be applauded for trying to m...
Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Expresso on the High Street?

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The Espresso Book Machine, has been coming to publishing for some time and in the last year we have continued our updates on the machine’s p...

Serialised Publishing Returns

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Hats off to Solaris Books in planning to serialise Chris Roberson’s next fantasy novel on its website for free. ‘Three Unbroken’ will be pub...
Monday, October 29, 2007

Democratisation of Ads

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Today we read about a young student Nick Haley, at the University of Leeds, England. He created a commercial for the iTouch, posted in on Yo...
Sunday, October 28, 2007

Library Dumps Books

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Wiltshire County Council, which encourages people to recycle, has been attacked by environmental campaigners and charity workers. This is no...

Phoney Wars

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The long awaited entry of the iPhone into the UK market is now only days away. On 9th of November the fashion icon that has started to redef...

Google Take Two Steps Forward and One Step Back

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Google like all major brands spreads its services at an alarming rate. Today we hear about ‘Google 411’ a free business telephone directory...
Wednesday, October 24, 2007

If the Omnivore Cap Fits...

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Well we couldn’t believe our eyes on reading of the giant who we called an omnivore has actually adopted the name for its new blog site! In ...

NewsSpace Democratisation

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HarperCollins and MySpace are both part of the Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire. It therefore not surprising to read, that MySpace is getti...

We are not Alone

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The driving forces that we see changing publishing may appear to be different but are very similar to those being experienced by others. In...
Tuesday, October 23, 2007

GodTube

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One of the genre we envisaged diverging at speed under digitisation was religion. Today we read about www.GodTube.com a $2.5 million Christi...

Direct from Manufacturer?

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So printers now aim to go after the drop ship market space and offer the Publisher’s a direct market and full margin. Its an interesting pro...

How Many Users Saw Your Ad?

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If you were placing an advert you would want to monitor the number of people who saw it and if possible the resultant conversion rate and fr...
Monday, October 22, 2007

The Cat will not be put back in this Bag

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Audio books appear to be in a digital tug of war. On one side stands the music industry who are rapidly changing business models, are digita...
Saturday, October 20, 2007

Scanning The Library World

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Whose library is best and which collection offers the richest content when digitised? We have seen the giant hover that is Google making a l...
Thursday, October 18, 2007

The Man eBooker Prize

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The Man Booker Prize is taking a bold step to reach the widest audience and are in negotiations with the British Council and publishers over...

Democratisation or Self Publishing

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So where do aspiring new authors go to get published? They can try a publisher or an agent, but the slush pile gets bigger and the rejection...
Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Zero email Friday

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The email has had a significant impact on all our lives and has made communication both a pain and a pleasure. Even with spam and junk email...
Monday, October 15, 2007

A Democratisation of Penguins (Puffins? -ed)

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The man who gave us the ‘long tail’, Chris Anderson, is now giving us the democratization of technology. An approach, which effectively exte...
Saturday, October 13, 2007

LongPen Reaches Across Restricted Borders

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It was interesting to read today in the Times of some very insightful words about writing from Margret Atwood. She has recently added a new ...
Monday, October 08, 2007

50 50, Ask the Audience, or Call a Friend?

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On the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair comes an interesting survey by them, that were published in today’s Bookseller.com. They surveyed 1,30...
Friday, October 05, 2007

Turning a Negative into a Positive

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The selling of review copies has long been a practiced the world over. A good friend of ours, Fred Bass, the owner of that iconic bookstore ...
Thursday, October 04, 2007

Zune Revamp

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Microsoft is ramping up its ‘iTunes and Apple competitor’ Zune offer. The question are whether it is merely following in the shadows and whe...