As our industry becomes increasingly hybrid – ever more digital, yet still significantly paper-based – the necessity to innovate is a growing problem for publishers. With revenues squeezed by falling prices and decreasing margins, innovation becomes more vital than ever: if we are to survive, publishers need to find new methods of working, new types…
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…
What publishing can learn from the fate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
In the highly unlikely event that anyone in publishing even vaguely remembers me in ten years’ time, it’ll be for this analogy. I can live with that. It was at Frankfurt last year, on a Tools of Change panel with Brian O’Leary and Sheila Bounford, that I first started wittering on about the Austro-Hungarian Empire…
The Future of Publishing Report
In 2011, I was commissioned by Media Futures to research and produce what became the Future of Publishing report. I include an excerpt from it here. To download the full report from Media Futures, click here. Shaping the Future Articles, reports, and conferences on the future of publishing are increasingly common; genuinely useful insights into…
An innovations manager answers your questions
I ended up doing a Q&A for the Guardian after I was rude about their publishing coverage. I’ve been rude about it since, but they’ve not asked me again… As many of you will know, we’re active tweeters at @Guardianbooks. We follow many interesting and funny people and we enjoy taking part in some lively…
A Bibliography of Sponges; or, can publishers mop up the backlist market?
Not much to add to this, except to note that the Google settlement is still no closer to becoming a reality… With Google’s interest in ebooks apparently on the wane, might successful e-publishers step into the breach? The announcement last week of Bloomsbury’s new venture, Bloomsbury Reader, will have prompted a few nods of recognition…
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…
A Visit from the Goon Squad
I’m including this review partly out of a desire for completism, but partly because I wonder whether a publisher would consider developing such an app for a novel now, even for an experimental yet popular novel like this one. Evan Schnittmann’s claim a few months earlier that the enhanced ebook was dead has mostly come…
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…
The pressfuturist manifesto 