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…
Tag: music industry
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…
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…
eBook pricing: learning from other people’s mistakes
My second piece for FutureBook, raising concerns about ebook pricing that we still haven’t resolved, and – three years before Amazon’s announcement of Matchbook – proposing bundling as a possible solution. Rereading this in 2013, I belatedly realise that the person who gave that very impressive presentation at Tools of Change Frankfurt in 2009 was…
The pressfuturist manifesto 