I'm doing my holiday shopping this week, and it struck me how in some ways, the changes the publishing industry faces right now are a lot like the changes a family goes through as people evolve and grow. In my family, we don't buy for adults but we do buy small presents for little children, and the puzzle this year has been what to do about the baby niece. Her toddler brother is no problem; he's old enough to have a personality and is obsessed with dinosaurs right now, so we'll be buying him something dinosaur-themed. But his newborn sister doesn't...

Is publishing “dying”? On FutureBook, Vicky Hartley expresses doubt. She points to a number of great new multimedia apps on tablets that demonstrate some publishers are finding ways to use the new capabilities of tablets to reach out to readers better than ever before. Heuristic Media’s London – A City Through Time is one example, and the works of children’s book-based-app publisher Nosy Crow are another. I’ll admit to being rather impressed by the trailer on London’s website, but I think it might be a bit premature to generalize from just a few book-related apps like this to...

That's the title of an article by Sophie Rochester in The Literary Platform.  Here's a sampling: ... … While it’s the start-ups who appear to be more agile and bold when it comes to creating innovative digital publishing business models, our established publishers still hold the key to producing some of the best quality content. We’ve listed ten things that we feel create the biggest challenges to publishers when it comes to digital innovation. This Thursday we’ll be holding the second annual FutureBook Innovation Workshop in association with The Literary Platform. Our Innovation Workshop speakers will demonstrate how they are currently dealing with some...

Venture capitalist Bill Gurley’s personal blog, Above the Crowd, has a post pointing out why Dropbox is a “major disruption” (that is, a disruptive innovation—”an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology” per Wikipedia) in the industry. Prompted by a new feature Dropbox added, to allow Android devices to synch photos automatically, Gurley points out that it’s easy to underestimate the importance of what Dropbox has done. He explains that Dropbox was the first...

On FutureBook, Shane Rae wonders if the education publishing industry is failing to innovate as it should. He describes the legacy model of education publishing, which involves prototyping, trial, feedback, and development to make sure that what gets published is completely finished before it sees print or CD-ROM, forms of media with a long shelf-life. The problem Rae sees is that this often leads to trying to match competitors’ products rather than better them—creating the thing that users want now, rather than what they might want down the road. Now, in the age of online applications...

I'm writing this today from the coffee shop at a Borders, one of the superstore locations in the middle of the U.S. to survive the company's recent bankruptcy and ensuing real estate culling. I was the first person in the store this morning, and in the past half hour nobody else has come in, which seems too bad: here are thousands upon thousands of books, comics, and magazines, and nobody to browse them. John C. Malone, who wants to buy 70% of Barnes & Noble, told the New York Times earlier this week why he thinks bookstores still matter (emphasis mine): "We...

India's publishing industry is exploding, writes Akshay Pathak at Publishing Perspectives. An estimated 90,000 titles are produced each year, with annual growth estimated to be around 30%. Production standards are improving, there's fresh investment in retail, and there's a growing consumerist middle class. But there's not a lot of hard data yet. Bookscan only covers some of the bigger bookstore chains, and while there are an estimated 19,000 publishers today, no single professional association has more than 1,000 members. Pathak—who works from New Delhi with the Frankfurt Book Fair—identifies some areas for growth. India needs more editors who are better trained, he...

Overseas attendees at this week's Tokyo International Book Fair can leave their phrase books at home since they will only need the line "atsui desu ne?", the ubiquitous Summer greeting that means "It's really hot, isn't it?". Temperatures in the high 80s will be compounded by crushing humidity that can stifle even the liveliest of debates. The eBook International Session boasts three respected executives for its speakers but these speakers may find the session's agenda is more of a hindrance to debate than the weather at Tokyo Big Sight. The session blurb promises answers to questions such as...

The Bookseller reports that in an address to the World e-Reading Congress, Random House’s deputy chairman Ian Hudson said that he expects e-book sales to exceed 8% of trade publishers’ sales in 2011, and possibly to reach 15% next year. He also reported that e-book sales in 2011 were so far outstripping 2010’s by a factor of 10 overall, though some titles sell better electronically than others. Hudson argued that traditional publishers are still going to be necessary into the e-publishing future because certain things such as editing will always be necessary to produce a readable book, and publishers...

From the press release: The Publishing Innovation Awards will recognize the best ebooks and book apps based on their merits in the areas of origination, development, production, design, and marketing. To celebrate the launch of the awards, organizers at Digital Book World 2011 Conference + Expo will present the inaugural Publishing Innovation Awards in five categories – Fiction, Non-Fiction, Reference, Children’s, and Comics -- during their opening ceremony on January 24th, 2011 at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers in New York City. "The Publishing Innovation Awards will honor those making strides in this nascent medium," said David Nussbaum, CEO of...

FutureBook, The Bookseller's digital blog, has announced its "digital innovation" awards for the book trade. The awards will be biannual and all category winners will go on to compete for the Digital Innovation award at The Bookseller's Industry Awards in May. The awards will cover: best app/enhanced ebook/interactive book; best workflow innovation; best content innovation; best website; best use of social media best integrated digital marketing campaign most inspiring digital publishing person. The awards will be held every six months and the winner will receive a certificate and a bottle of champagne....

Last week, we covered Cory Doctorow’s rant against the closed nature of the iPad. Lately, a number of responses have emerged to Doctorow and others who hold similar opinions: “You may not like it, but it’s progress.” Steven Johnson, author of a forthcoming book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, has an essay in the New York Times in which he considers the matter. Johnson points out the strange contradiction that, in a world where open development platforms are regarded to be the best “generative” environment for diversity and innovation, the closed...