Nick Atkinson has an interesting post over on FutureBook this morning. In it he asks three questions he feels people aren’t asking about ebooks. The ones he hits on are: EBooks  aren’t actually that exciting, so why are people buying them? Why am I rubbish at selling books online? Where the heck is my audience? They used to shop at Borders. he’s got a refreshing perspective on some of those: So why are we struggling so much to make a digital book look and feel like a book? I remember the overwhelming sense of disappointment, anti-climax and resignation that I felt when I first looked...

Easily the smartest piece I’ve read so far this year. What’s more I think it’s so good it’ll hold that title until the end of the year too. This just a flavour: I don’t believe that B&N has fully tuned into the economics of working in a network environment. For all the talk of the democratization of the Internet and the Long Tail, network economies tend to be winner-takes-all. Amazon is fast approaching a position where it becomes a virtual monopoly like other tech giants before it — Microsoft with Windows and Office, Facebook with social networking, Google for Web search,...

  The rise of Interest in Kindle over the last year. Note the spike, now surpassed, from last Christmas 2011 has seen an upsurge in interest in ebooks and ereaders in Ireland. IPN started to notice a huge spike in search traffic for Kindle’s, ebooks and a number of other devices in November. In an effort to help people make decisions in the run in to what looks to be the biggest ebook Christmas in Ireland so far we decided to write about ebooks and e-readers in Ireland, where to get them, how to use them and everything else. If the piece doesn’t answer...

It is becoming increasingly clear that bookshops, both chains and independents, are the first segment of the trade book publishing industry to face wrenching decisions that amount to bets on survival in this digital transition. Publishers, agents, authors, wholesalers and many others all need to respond and some have already made significant efforts to do so, but it is clear that bookshops are the facing the full thrust of this change right now. The way I see it bookshops have three choices: 1) Bet On Digital Betting on digital means much less emphasis on real bricks and mortar locations. In order to win in this space...

Irish Publishing News has changed. From now on the focus of the site will be weekly rather than daily. That means that while there may be news stories posted at other times, the majority of stories will go live on Fridays. This may, over time, impact on the type of stories the site covers and how it covers them, but for now the content will be the same. It also means that accessing IPN daily may not always yield new content*. For those who dislike this change, I hope time will convince you that it’s a worthwhile one, for those...

Mike Shatzkin looks at the current realities of ebooks and print books and what is happening. I think we are only a few months shy of encountering the kind of events I describe here, at least in the US: In fact, the current improvement in the profit picture suggests that the big houses have done a remarkably good job of managing the transition from print to digital so far. What is implied by the reported numbers, but receiving little attention, is that print sales are down pretty dramatically. Print runs are down with one trade house telling me that their midlist non-fiction...

A really excellent post by Seth Godin on the future of Libraries in the digital world. I think that in it, he approaches the truth for far more then Librarians! The emphasis added in paragraph two is my own. And I’ve added it because I believe that the role of impresario is currently waiting for someone to step into it. That might mean publishers, librarians, author or booksellers, who it is hardly matters in some senses, but there is a clear opening for someone to act as a central coordinator and promoter. Godin gets this, maybe some folks will listen to him. And then we...

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...

That's the title of an article in the Irish Publishing News today.  Here's a snippet: Adrian White, bookseller and author, discusses why he’s pricing his novel at $9.99 in digital form. Pricing my ebook at $9.99? Am I crazy? Maybe so, but here’s why:I have three novels published as ebooks. Two have been published previously by Penguin Books but the third is published exclusively as an ebook. When I came to set the prices, I took the opportunity to try out the three different price points of €2.99, $4.99 and $9.99. I’m well aware of the power of $0.99 as an attention-grabbing...

In what is a fascinating piece for a number of reasons, The Telegraph reports on Bloomsbury’s successes in selling ebooks. I’m struck most forcefully by three things: Richard Charkin is as refreshingly open, honest and forthright as ever, which is good to see. We still miss his blog though. Bloomsbury have been playing the game pretty well on the library front and their partnership with Exact Editions seems to be yielding dividends. Charkin highlights the speed at which older readers are taking up ebooks. I’m not terribly surprised by this, but it is interesting, considering they remain...

An interesting piece on the business of self-publishing. I was struck in particular by this section pointing to the weakness of content producers in the self-publishing plane. That said, this strikes me as some kind of preferential treatment by booksellers and ultimately a bad decision by B&N, but perhaps there is some logical reason for it: This is not to say steering clear of the big publishers doesn’t cause complications. So far, Folsom has not been able to sell the foreign rights to her work, meaning right now she can only market her books...

Fascinating throughout but this passage is striking both because it highlights the remaining defence of publishing and because if it is believed by publishers, it heralds the demise of publishing as we know it. Getting ‘its internal dynamics’ right means gutting the publisher as it stands and forever changing the way the industry works: Publishing is neither printing nor distribution. It is neither paper nor e-ink. It is the creation and support of content, and the delivery of content in whatever ways are both appreciated by readers and profitable. At the moment, the industry is being...