The battle is not between self- and traditional publishers. It’s between books and the rest of the entertainment array, most of it digitally powered long before books were. It may be time we all got back on one team and started facing outward—at the real competition. Read More
At Frankfurt: The FutureBook's Innovation Awards Shortlist
Five high profile individuals in publishing based in the UK and US are shortlisted for the FutureBook Innovation Awards’ Most Inspiring Digital Publishing Person, an award sponsored by Frankfurt Book Fair. Read More
Japan’s Discover 21: In Frankfurt to Go Farther
Discover 21’s Yumiko Hoshiba says that the import-export gap isn’t due only to a need for translation but also, by tradition, to the fact that the Japanese industry has been thought to have “all the readers it needed.” Read More
At Frankfurt Book Fair's CONTEC: Content, Technology…and Questions
The conference name CONTEC 2013 is created from “the marriage of content and technology,” according to the event’s programming director Kat Meyer. Read More
CONTEC: Self-Publishing's Implications and Impact
As Dr. Florian Geuppert of Books on Demand in Hamburg tells us from his own company’s seven-nation survey: “We have about 25,000 authors…these authors are in Germany, yes, but also in Austria, Switzerland, France, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. So we asked them what is their motivation? We also wanted to compare the different countries and see where self-publishing really is. Because the movement (toward self-publishing) is broad in Europe, but not at the level of what we see in the US. It will probably get there.” Read More
Do All Conference Roads Lead to Writers Now?
By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson Ether for Authors: Do All Conference Roads Lead to Writers Now? [dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]T[/dropcap]he centricity of the entrepreneurial writer in publishing circles still comes and goes as a focus these days. We’re in the early days, yes. But Jon Fine’s line about starting with the author as customer and working backward… Read More
What Happens When Everybody's a Critic?
Even on the consumer-review level of a site like Goodreads, the presumably smart aspect of a community inclusive both of the writers and their consumers, the readers, is new and evolving. Read More
Publishing is Now a “Data Game”
The session “Big Data / Little Data: The Practical Capture, Analysis, and Integration of Data for Publishers” takes place on Tuesday, October 8 from 10:40 to 11:30 a.m. at the Frankfurt Academy’s CONTEC 2013 Conference as part of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Read More
What's Important in the Man Booker Prize Debate?
In a news conference today in London, officials of the esteemed Man Booker Prize have announced that the program, as rumored, will begin accepting entries from beyond its traditional range of the UK, the Republic of Ireland, and the Commonwealth. American authors and others working in English will be eligible for entry by their publishers. Read More
Can You Sell eBooks on the Half Shell?
I’ll be glad when more details come out about compensation for content owners. I’m also interested to see what a one-price buffet plan does, if anything, to our culture of reading. Until we know more, we just don’t know what’s inside the new ebook subscription service called Oyster. Read More