‘Challenging all assumptions of the past’ may be only the beginning of life after the digital disruption, Tom Goodwin says. And when he speaks at London Book Fair’s Quantum Conference, he’ll be talking about the ‘share-of-attention’ dilemma. Read More
If Anybody Should Know This, It’s Publishing People Enough disrupting! Disrupting is the unthinking mantra of technology companies desperate to carve a niche. – Michael Bhaskar During the FutureBook Hack in London last June, Faber Press’ Henry Volans said to me that it’s interesting that “publishing has taken the digital disruption very hard.” As it… Read More
Even as we started #FutureChat, some of the keenest observations on The Bookseller’s new listing of the 100 most influential people in the UK book business were being drawn by my colleague Philip Jones in his commentary,Centuries apart. He wrote: Looking back at the first Bookseller Century (as it was then known, in 2009), is like… Read More
Reviewing? What’s Your Motive? Next week, I’ll be leading a session on criticism — “When To Listen And What To Hear” — at Writer Unboxed’s “Un-Conference” event in Salem, Massachusetts…where they know a few things about being critical. That session and this column are not about the more extreme moments in consumer review that have… Read More
Three signal keynote addresses open The FutureBook Conference in two weeks, from : George Berkowski, author of How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time Carla Buzasi, Global Chief Content Officer with WGSN Tom Weldon, CEO, Penguin Random House UK in conversation with Bookseller Editor… Read More
‘No Need To Come Out On Top’ It’s time to back off a bit on the arguments for self-publishing. In a classic example of “burying your lead” — along with a hatchet –the author-activist Hugh Howey quietly has signaled a stand-down to his supporters this week And he’s doing it with the note of generosity… Read More
“There is no flattening out yet over here in ebook sales” …“Our country is quite unique in the diversity of its ebook landscape,” says Timo Boezeman, a sales account manager in the digital division of the Dutch distributor CB Logistics. Based in Culemborg in the central Netherlands, this 140-year-old company (formerly Centraal Boekhuis) — operating… Read More
When everyone sits down to the midnight feast this weekend at FutureBook Hack in the University College London’s Roberts Building, they can toast, among others, one Alice Ryan. The conference and community manager for The Bookseller is certainly managing some major community now, a collective of more than 100 developers, designers, entrepreneurs, engineers, coders, programmers,… Read More
“Much of the energy and innovation I see,” Peter Meyers tells me, “is around ‘more’ — more backlist, more sharing, more videos. I think what’s still underserved and unexplored is better tools for readers. How do we do things like explore inside a book, capture what we’ve learned, recall what we’ve read? That books in… Read More