Posted by Michael Bhaskar
on 6 May, 2008
eBooks are everywhere. They romped gleefully through the London Book Fair, dominating all in their unstoppable zeitgeisty path. The Bookseller cannot stop writing about digital issues. Our dear broadsheets are even picking up on the story, reporting about the rise of digital here, here and here. Publishers, services providers, manufacturers, gurus, consultancies, warehouses, distributors, information vendors and, yes, readers pile joyfully into the gleaming future of the digital space. A utopian world of digital plenty is upon us. Undervalued for years, it seems that digital publishing is finding its place in the sun.
Which is why I am worried.
Continue reading "Hype and Hoping" »
Posted by James Long
on 17 April, 2008
There was a strong focus on digitisation at this year’s London Book Fair, with a full programme of seminars on the subject, and a general buzz around how to go about digitising your content. Sara also revealed, during the seminar entitled “Commercial Angles to Digitisation: Do They Exist in the Book World?”, that Pan Macmillan will publish new print and e-books simultaneously from January 2009. Other big publishers making similar moves are Penguin and Bloomsbury. Read a US perspective on this UK-based news here.
There seems to be a healthy progression underway from the question of “Will people want to read from a screen?” to active engagement with the task of going digital. With any luck, at LBF 2009 we’ll be looking back at the year of digitisation and focusing on what else we can do with digital publishing, apart from eBooks.
For a quick run down on the central issues, listen to Sara’s segment in The Guardian podcast from the LBF.
Continue reading "ell bee eff is gonna rock ya" »
