I have a few reservations about Open Access. In some respects, that’s hardly surprising. After all, I work for a big publisher – not, admittedly, an Elsevier, but still one of the world’s largest university presses, one of those not-for-profit organisations whose deep differences from the likes of Elsevier are too commonly elided in the…
Category: conference reports
Reaching readers: my talk from the 2013 Independent Publishers Guild conference
Academic and professional publishers’ routes to market are changing fast. In this talk, I showcased some of the best ways to build close relationships in niche communities and across social media. If you prefer, you can download a PDF of this talk at the end of the post. INTRODUCTION I’ve ten years’ experience in digital…
Beyond the Book: the Society of Young Publishers conference 2012
The 2012 Society of Young Publishers conference once again matched more expensive events, with an excellent range of speakers at the cutting edge of the industry. The 2012 Society of Young Publishers conference once again offered a range and quality of speakers to rival publishing events that cost ten times as much to attend. In…
Publishing within a particle accelerator: the ePublishing Innovation Forum 2011
Though at the time this didn’t seem one of the more interesting conferences, I attended, in retrospect it raises a couple of interesting points. The suggestion that ebooks might hit 50% of total sales by 2016 now looks perhaps a little unlikely (though the same suggestion had been made by Victoria Barnsley at Frankfurt the…
The future’s bright, the future’s mobile (2011 London Book Fair Digital Conference part II)
Looking back on this report from the afternoon sessions of the 2011 London Book Fair digital conference, what strikes me is that though mobile has proved as important as we expected, nobody’s really taken advantage of the fact that the mobile phone companies, like Apple and Amazon, already have customer credit card details, and so…
What can other industries teach us about digital? (2011 London Book Fair Digital Conference Part I)
In 2011, publishing was still looking nervously towards other industries for advice, as evidenced by the number of speakers at the 2011 London Book Fair digital conference drawn from the music and video industries. It was also the year of Evan Schnittmann’s controversial, if ultimately mostly accurate, assertion that the enhanced ebook was dead. the…
Futurebook 09/10 – what’s another year?
This post looks back at the first FutureBook conference in 2009 and towards the second. Some things have changed in the intervening years, as one might expect. Publishing’s cultural cringe towards the music industry has, as suspected, diminished, and piracy is less of an over concern, though George Walkley’s optimism regarding cloud storage widening our…
The view from Frankfurt 2010: who controls the ebook business?
Victoria Barnsley and Mike Shatzkin discuss the risks posed by Amazon and the need for publishers to focus on readers. So little has changed… One of the most in-demand events at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair was Friday’s round-table discussion: The eBook Business: Who’s in Control? Entry was so carefully restricted that even panel member…
Mobile opportunities: The 2010 London Book Fair Digital Conference
Interesting to note how some of the key themes of the new publishing – particularly pricing and the relationship with reader – were already at the forefront of industry thinking at the first London Book Fair digital conference. The enthusiasm for new forms of enhanced ebooks has dissipated somewhat now, though… Sunday’s London Book Fair…
The pressfuturist manifesto 