Michael beat me to it last week, but I wanted to reflect further on the Waterstones / Sony ebook launch last week. Anecdotally, Waterstones store staff report a great deal of interest from customers, and the rumour mills (or well-planned leak??) put a *correction: five* figure number on the Sony Readers sold by the morning [...]
It is a little bit exciting, I must admit
Posted on 9 September, 2008
Posted in General, Publishing, Reading devices, eBooks
Work in progress
Posted on 15 July, 2008
Posted in General, Reading devices, eBooks
The blogosphere has been buzzing since the App Store launched over last weekend with comments about ‘dozy publishers’ who have missed a great opportunity to make their books available on the iPhone. But apart from a few digital PR points scored against competing publishers, there doesn’t seem to me to be any huge value in [...]
Buzzword burnout
Posted on 19 June, 2008
Posted in General
I’m at my second conference on Social Networks in two weeks. I am at severe risk of buzzword burnout and if anyone asks me again whether I am twittering this conference I cannot be held accountable for my actions.
The conference has been cleverly self-knowing and instituted a game of buzzword bingo, which most people had [...]
Manifesto Download
Posted on 27 May, 2008
Posted in General, Sara's Manifesto
A few readers have asked if they could get the book publisher’s manifesto in one document, so, without further ado, please find a pdf below.
A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century
This is the text of a forthcoming article in the journal Library Trends.
A book publisher’s manifesto – Part VI (The End)
Posted on 20 May, 2008
Posted in General, Publishing, Sara's Manifesto, eBooks, read/write culture
The marathon is almost over. Here’s my final posting. Phew. Thanks for staying with me, for all the comments and the links. Great to have stirred up such a debate!
Publishers have always spoken proudly of their role as custodians of copyright, preservers of culture, but how much have they really done to ensure the existence [...]
A book publisher’s manifesto – Part V
Posted on 19 May, 2008
Posted in General, Publishing, Sara's Manifesto, eBooks, read/write culture
The weekend brought us a break from my epic article posting marathon, as our network server connection broke down and I could not retrieve the original article… So after a short break, here’s Part V. We’re nearly there now.
The question really is no longer, “Will consumers read on screens in the future?” or “Will all [...]
A book publisher’s manifesto- Part IV
Posted on 16 May, 2008
Posted in General, Reading devices, Sara's Manifesto
Customisation will not stop at bundling multiple texts together, though. Something that has shocked traditional media companies perhaps more than anything about the Web 2.0 world is the desire of consumers to produce and to share rich media content of their own rather than or in addition to being passive consumers of media streamed down [...]
A book publisher’s manifesto – Part III
Posted on 15 May, 2008
Posted in General, Publishing, Sara's Manifesto, eBooks, read/write culture
Continuing the serialised version of my article for Library Trends:
And whilst the edges of the book become more porous, the concept of a ‘book as unit’ slowly disappears further into history, new business models are already emerging. The value in the chain moves from a model which intertwines content with distribution to a model [...]
A book publisher’s manifesto – Part II
Posted on 14 May, 2008
Posted in General, Publishing, Sara's Manifesto, eBooks, read/write culture
Continuing my six part epic essay on the future of publishing. If there is one….
As digital reading devices go, Amazon’s Kindle is probably the first to at least recognise the importance of the ‘connectivity’ between our differing modes of reading, the fact that readers might like to follow up references within [...]
A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century
Posted on 13 May, 2008
Posted in General, Publishing, Sara's Manifesto, eBooks, read/write culture
Over the next few days I am going to blog a piece I have written for a US-based library journal, Library Trends, on how traditional publishers need to position themselves in the changing media flows of a networked era. It’s a very long article so I’m gonna serialise it and blog it in six ‘bite-sized’ [...]
