At this week's conference of the Independent Publishers' Guild, Jo Forshaw talked about the way in which the audio market is opening up, beginning to provide a challenge to ebooks. Read more
A generally buoyant picture has emerged from the London Book Fair, which showed an international publishing business in relatively good shape and double-digit growth in the all-important number of pre-registered visitors to the Fair. The mood of optimism was stoked by the low pound and several new developments. Read more
The successful growth of new British publisher Head of Zeus shows how an international approach to publishing can put a business in a strong position through challenging the traditional approach to publishing markets. Read more
Some nervousness has been expressed by authors and staff in the last few days about the impending purchase by Bertelsmann of part of the Pearson share of Penguin Random House, but is there really much reason to feel anxious about this? Read more
The first major publishing news of the New Year has been the announcement that Pearson, having declared a profit warning because of change and volatility in the educational market and declining sales in higher education, is intending to offload its 47% stake in Penguin Random House - and its partner Bertelsmann is keen to acquire it. Read more
The changes digitisation has brought about in the agent's role are substantial but one of the unchanging things about getting an agent is that developments in the publishing world have made remarkably little difference to it - it's as difficult as ever, some would say more so. Read more
So, another London Book Fair has come and gone. Our links this week include some interesting stories about the Fair but the main thing seems to be that this was a lively and confident affair, with publishers from all over the world bullish and ready to do business. Read more
Independent London publishing house Atlantic has recently had a new managing director, Will Atkinson. He put forward the company's publishing philosophy very clearly in an article for Bookbrunch, which sadly is behind their paywall. It is possible however to quote what he says in his article, ‘Publishing culture and commerce': Read more
'I did something which I haven't done before, which was really just play. I went into the British Library, looked at a whole load of books about subjects I was interested in, and just waited to see anything that jumped out at me.
Kate Thompson was horrified to discover that her book, The Sunday Times bestseller, A Mother's Promise, had been plagiarised and rewritten by AI - just days after publication. And then it happened again.
On Saturday, the Trump administration fired Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright OfficeThe US copyright office has information on its website about how to register and what advantages there are in doing so. www.copyright.gov/register/, just two days after the dismissal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, under whose auspices the U.S. Copyright Office operates. Perlmutter was appointed by Hayden in 2020.
Protection of copyright has always been a top priority for the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies, and that point was driven home again during the organization's annual meeting held via Zoom on May 8. Read more
Mark Price has said he has been advised that there are "two grounds on which a legal case could realistically be pursued" against Meta in the UK for the company's use of pirated books to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Read more
When readers first met her in The Golden Compass (first published in the U.K. in 1995 as Northern LightsHandy site which provides links to 7,500 US publishers' sites and online catalogues. www.lights.com/publisher/), Lyra Belacqua was a young orphan, hiding in a wardrobe at Oxford's Jordan College, spying on the scholars she lived among in a world with some parallels to our own. Read more
'The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.'