For the past five years or so, I've read books on my phone. The practice started innocently enough. I write book reviews from time to time, and so publishers sometimes send me upcoming titles that fall roughly within my interests. Read more
Saving movies to watch later is a breeze on YouTube TV, where "recording without storage limits" comes free with the monthly subscription fee of $64.99. There are 85-plus channels on offer, and the jewels you choose from this wealth of movies and shows are kept in what they call your "library." Read more
Author Rumaan Alam kept his expectations low, even as the film rights to his upcoming book "Leave the World Behind" became the center of a bidding contest among Hollywood studios this summer. Read more
Publishing has a new question to ponder this week: what could Taylor Swift do for us? Swift's triumph: she got a tech giant to change its mind. Read more
I love ebooks. Despite their unimaginative page design, monotonous fonts, curious approach to hyphenation, and clunky annotation utilities, they're convenient and easy on my aging eyes. But I wish they didn't come wrapped in legalese.
Are we at the beginnings of a backlash against big tech? Last week the New Yorker published a disruption takedown from Jill Lepore in which she castigated the tech community for its "reckless and ruthless" philosophy of disruption. Over the weekend the Observer criticised tech companies for sometimes thinking "they are above good rules". Read more
How can we accept the decline of newspapers and magazines, and the quality journalism therein, or accept the exploitation of writers? How can we retain valuable reporting, which requires payment? Read more
For the last six weeks following the dismissal of William Lynch as the company's CEO there have been a slew of articles eulogizing Barnes & Noble. Read more
By the time a federal judge ruled last week that Apple had illegally colluded with five of the so-called Big Six publishers to raise e-book prices, just about no one in the book business was surprised. All the publishers named in the lawsuit had already taken a long look at the uphill battle and the crippling legal bills and decided to settle. Read more
A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Apple had illegally conspired with five of the six biggest publishers to try to raise prices in the budding e-books market.
The decision came two days after Barnes & Noble lost its chief executive and said it would not appoint another, signaling that the biggest chain of physical bookstores could be immediately broken up. Read more
Ebook sales plunged in October 2015, with adult books dropping 22% in one month, compared to children's ebooks which went down a whopping 44.7%. As we've discussed elsewhere, the children's market has a strong preference for print books, with both parents and children preferring them. Read more
It's a slightly demanding read, but Mike Shatzkin's latest post on The Shatzkin Files is essential reading if you want to understand the contemporary bookselling scene and how it is increasingly controlled and shaped by the huge conglomerates which dominate the web. Read more
The big story this week is the devastating news for Apple that it has lost its case. A federal judge in New York has ruled that Apple did collude with five big publishers to fix ebook prices. Read more
At the beginning of the week it looked like the London Book Fair would be the story of the week. But by mid-week a tsunami had swept through the book world and there was only one story dominating the headlines. Read more
The New Year has started with a mass of news from the ebook front, where things are really moving very fast. In the States ebook sales surged after Christmas. In the UK the figures show that more than one million ereaders and more than half a million tablet devices were received as gifts over Christmas, with Amazon and Apple the leading suppliers of e-readers and tablets respectively. Read more
This has been one of those weeks when there’s been so much happening that it’s difficult to cover it in a single column. Apple has broken the news of its iPad and, amidst the focus on that, Amazon has already started to fight back. This could be a turning-point and how publishing, books and authors come out of all this is hard to predict. Read more