On his blog, Eoin Purcell points out that, while Apple’s in-app purchase crackdown means that bookstores such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble can’t sell e-books directly through their apps without losing out on the 30% agency fee, it also means that publishers can create their own apps to sell e-books directly, and just pay Apple the 30% they would have paid to Amazon. Purcell seems to think this is a tremendous opportunity that publishers should take advantage of. I’m not so sure. It seems to me that it might be hard for publishers to get people invested enough...

On his blog the other day, Eoin Purcell brought up an interesting point about how electronic books are changing the nature of the book market. In the old print market, bookstores could only present a limited number of titles so they concentrated mainly on new releases plus a very small selection of publisher backlists. Of course, providing full access to the “long tail” of all titles was the foundation of Amazon’s business model, but even then it was limited to titles that were available in print. But with e-books, there’s no reason any title should go out of...

Last year I chose some folks who I though had made 2009 interesting in publishing terms and I believed would do the same in 2010. I think I was broadly right about them. You can see the 2009 list here. For 2010 I’m doing the same. Richard Nash ~ The Risk Taker Nash is moving ahead with Cursor a new type of publishing company based on communities, authors, shorter contracts and generally many of the ideas that have been floating around books for a few years now. He’s fiery, inspiring and willing to take a gamble (and be wrong...

I’ve seen a lot of comment about Amazon’s offer of 4 weeks free Nielsen data to writers through their Author Central product. Some of it is fair and some of it is unfair. I think it’s fair to say that authors will like this, that publishers should really have been making access to sales data more freely available to authors anyway and that in general access to the data will be both useful and enlightening to some authors. I think it’s unfair to say that not allowing access to Nielsen data showed how foolish/badly-run/outdated the industry was. Most of the time I’d...

In the last few days several stories have reminded me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask all publishers. I think it is a question that’s especially vital for small and medium publishers. What’s more it’s one that acts as a good acid test of your digital strategy and where your thinking is on the future direction of publishing. And the question is: Who Is Your Digital Publisher? What were the stories? We lets start with the news that Taschen announced that they have appointed a digital publisher move along a little to the news that Penguin’s new digital publisher is a former...

 One of the most interesting things about ebooks is that they seem to attract in their initial stages, string demand from fiction readers. Perhaps it is that their current formats are best suited to long form narrative. Whatever the reason, the top ten from Easons shows exactly this impact with only two non-fiction title making the top ten! 1 Homecoming by Cathy Kelly2 Room by Emma Donoghue3 Skippy Dies by Paul Murray4 Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert5 Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich6 I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore7 The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown8 The Chosen One by...

The Frankfurt Book Fair this year was an interesting one for me. It crystalized a few of the many ideas that have been bouncing around in my head. Publishing Perspectives in particular touched on one of the MAJOR issues for smaller market publishers and I wanted to hammer home the point in this post. I have bad news for publishers of English language books in smaller markets and by that I mean English language markets outside of the UK and US: Being a small market english language publisher is going to get harder as digital grows Put simply I believe that US and...

 There has been some debate over whether cannibalisation of print sales by digital sales is actually occurring and what’s more some debate about whether, if it is occurring, it matters a great deal, all mostly prompted by The Bookseller’s recent piece on ebook sales beginning to impact sales of print books: For example, the e-book market share of the science fiction and fantasy sector globally for the 10 weeks since June was 10%, more than treble the genre’s market share of print book sales. The share taken by romance and saga books was 14%, seven times its...

 I’m chairing an absolutely amazing panel of speakers this weekend at the Mountains To Sea book festival. The discussion is about books, readers and writers in the digital age. I’m including the description below and tickets can be booked HERE Readers, Writers and the Digital Revolution Recently, Jeff Bezos reported that Amazon now sells more e-books than new hardbacks. What does this portend for the future of reading? Are traditional bookshops, the paperback, the novel itself facing extinction? A stellar panel of experts debates the question – how will we be reading in the year 2020? Tim...

 Any change, even for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. Arnold Bennett Just Two Things Somewhere in the rush to judgement and foolish reaction to Andrew Wylie’s deal with Amazon two major things have been overlooked. The first is that Agents have as much to lose from the ongoing disintermediation of publishing as publishers do. That has important implications for how we should think about Wylie’s deal and the ramifications of it. The second is that regardless of this deal the technology and the motivation exist to enable this ongoing disintermediation. If Wylie were ...

This week Amazon announced that, for the first time ever on Amazon.com, ebooks had outsold hardbacks, proving that whilst some of us are reluctant to part with our beloved bound volumes, there is an ever increasing number embracing the concept of electronic reading. And with Apple‘s much heralded iPad finally launching on these shores, we decided to take a look at some of the various apps available for reading books on your iPads, iPods and iPhones, and determine which, if any, are worth their salt. All reviewed Apps are available for free on the iTunes App...

A few months ago I wrote this: As readers shift to digital, the economics of book shops will become skewed, favouring online emporia. Booksellers can react by hand-selling to customers and making themselves relevant, in the way that Raven Books in Blackrock, Co Dublin, has. (I am increasingly sure of finding a pile of relevant books there every time I walk in). No doubt this will mean concentrating on older, out-of-print, and second-hand books, titles that appeal directly to the customer, and print-on-demand works (though I am less convinced of the economic case for this). Whatever way you look at it, as...