Tim Waterstone is embarking on a new e-book project. It kind of involves owning a bookstore again. Sort of. Waterstone talked about his new venture, Read Petite, with The Guardian this week. It will be officially announced to the public at the London Book Fair next week. Read Petite is a digital imprint for short-form e-books. It will include fiction and non-fiction titles, according to The Guardian. The site will use a monthly subscription format and have unlimited access to all the work, which will be about 9,000 words or fewer. Here's Waterstone, as quoted in The Guardian: A lot of the best short fiction has...

You may remember a post we ran last Monday about Waterstones Academy, a sort of university for retail booksellers that looks as if it may be launching in England sometime later this year. Waterstones, for those of you not familiar with the name, is a UK-based bookstore chain with some 288 locations dotted throughout the UK and mainland Europe. Courtesy of The Bookseller, we learned that the nine-month-long program, assuming it happens, will be operated through a partnership with the University of Derby, a public school located south of Manchester that's currently home to a little over 22,000 students. (The Academy will also be accredited through...

The Bookseller recently published what appears to be a very interesting article about a sort of bookseller's university that Waterstones—the UK-based bookstore chain—plans to open at some point in the near-to-distant future. And I use the term "appears," by the way, because the article in question in available only to subscribers of the website's premium content, of which I am not one. Bummer. The article's abstract, at any rate, claims that Waterstones Academy, as the school will be known, will be an "industry first" in the UK. Students of the nine month-long program, which will be operated in partnership with the...

Along with the Financial Times, The Telegraph, and The Guardian, just about every UK-based newspaper that covers the publishing industry ran the sort of 'E-Books Will Save Us!' story yesterday that seems forehead-slappingly obvious at first glance ... and yet is nevertheless rather comforting to read—especially considering that the good news has been officially confirmed with real figures. Here's the deal: Bloomsbury Publishing, it seems, has just reported "a [two percent] overall decline in [print] title sales" for the last four months of 2012. However, due to the fact that the company's e-book sales jumped 58 percent year-on-year in the same period, Bloomsbury's year-on-year operating...

If you're the type who regularly follows international news of the ever-expanding e-book scene, you may have already heard about the unusual business collaboration between the Italian book publishing company known as RSC Libri, and the Italian train company, ITV. The partnership, which was announced at The Bookseller's FutureBook 2012 conference in London, and which has been dubbed E-books Aboard!, "will give passengers on Italian trains free access [to] e-books," according to The Bookseller. The general idea, as the post explains, is "to study the way consumers read and discover digital content." Assuming the experiment leads to any particularly eye-opening findings, it'll probably be...

On The Bookseller’s blog, Ed Handyside of UK publisher Myrmidon Books complains that the price of a standard paperback in the UK has not risen with inflation—six years ago it was £7.99, and today it is still £7.99 (US$10.52). Since the publisher’s recommended retail price is printed on the cover of the book, this means that booksellers cannot raise prices to account for inflation—so they take their margin out of the publishers’, writers’, and agents’ share instead. Handyside writes: Book prices must be allowed to rise organically and incrementally. Booksellers themselves must be allowed and...

The UK publication, The Bookseller, used to be an excellent source of information for readers of TeleRead.  However, that is no longer true. The Bookseller has gone behind a paywall, and an expensive paywall at that. £186 for a digital subscription.  Since I no longer have access to their news I can't bring it to you.  A few articles are in front of the paywall, but it takes too much time for me to figure out which are and which are not paywall blocked. So, for the foreseeable future, The Bookseller has been dropped from my list of feeds....

The Bookseller has a commentary column from Caradoc King, chairman and joint managing director of prestigious literary agency A P Watt. King reflects on the quandaries that the new digital age brings with it, questions for which one would expect such an agency to have ready answers—but that remain pernicious even today. A number of these questions have to do with the 25% vs. 50% e-book royalty issue on backlist titles—and whether to set up independent e-publishing units for out-of-print books or titles that do not appeal to traditional publishers. Some publishers are refusing to budge on the 25%...

On The Bookseller, Damian Horner notes that the rise of e-books means a fall in the prominence of the book cover, and ponders what that will mean for the industry. (We’ve covered this ourselves a time or two.) He points out that, until the e-book era, we were able to see what our fellow passengers in public transportation were reading, and perhaps be moved to investigate the book for ourselves. With so many covered books being replaced by e-readers, that curiosity-satisfying opportunity for passengers—and marketing opportunity for publishers—is vanishing. In the past, the book cover...

The Bookseller reports that a Nielsen Book study shows that the number of new books being published every year is steadily rising, due largely to the influence of digital and print-on-demand publishing. Of course, this figure comes from the ISBNs that Nielsen issues; if the number of books published without ISBNs (offered for sale directly via websites, local stores, or other means) has also increased, that might make it even greater. This puts me in mind of the old argument about how the Internet has “killed” the music industry, and the oft-heard retort that, no, it’s just hurting the...

That's the title of an article in The Bookseller today. The increasing importance of digital publishing has been a strong influence on the new entrants to The Bookseller 100, the definitive list of the most influential people in the book trade. Thirty-six new names have graced the 100, which is heavily influenced by the changing ways of how people read and buy books following the UK launches of the Amazon ­Kindle store and Apple iPad. The latter’s iBookstore manager, Georgina Atwell, is one of the new entries, reflecting how she will influence the future digital landscape. Gordon Willoughby, Amazon EU’s director of...

The 2010 survey was completed by 2,600 respondents and 47% of them had paid for an ebook - up from 18% last year. 80% of respondents said that they had read an ebook and this is up from about 40% last year. But Jones warned that booksellers were being left behind in the race for digital sales. In total 85% of publishers said that they sold books or journals in electronic format, but just 37% of booksellers said they sold content electronically. And while digital sales were below where most people had expected them to be, publishers' expectations of growth...