Your 2015 high points

Let’s do the time warp again Then Amazon switched to per-page payouts on KDP Select. Right? And then Amazon changed it to different per-page rates for various territories. And then Amazon opened a physical bookstore. Run for your life! (If the latest Shelf Awareness account of reactions to that bit of bricks and mortar is right,… Read More

What Are We Rewarding In Children’s Literature? (#GuysDoRead)

Are Children’s Books ‘A Women’s Profession’? The announcement today of the shortlist for the annual Waterstones Children’s Book Prize brought an early response: While the award’s shortlists started out as reasonably gender-balanced, they have tended to favor female authors and illustrators in recent years. The 2014 shortlist caught my eye last year as there were only three… Read More

Applauding gaps in 'retail stonewalling'

What might have been an hour or so of complaint and commiseration became — in the tweeting hands of The FutureBook community — something more hopeful and more nuanced than some would have predicted. Our topic, ‘Retail stonewalling’ and Amazon sightings in bookstores, took its phrase from Amazon Publishing author Tim Ferriss. And its starting point was The… Read More

FutureBook Hack's invocation: The Rev. Matthew Cashmore

 Blackwell’s digital director Matthew Cashmore is going to make some Anglican parish a very fine priest. “I get criticised,” he told the #FutureBookHack’s gathered assembly Saturday morning, “every time I introduce a hack day and tell people, ‘You can change the world with what you do this weekend.” Seated at tables and on beanbags, standing… Read More

That Tug Of War Over Your Book Fetish

Did we throw over email and go back to envelopes and stamps? No. And we’re not going to see ebooks go into “a decline.” eReading is not just a silly fad that will fall apart and leave us grasping for “good old books.” eBooks and other electronic, networked book-forms eventually will come into their own and will finally be the standard. Read More