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Video game becomes part of Poland’s official school reading list as the...
For the purists among us who think that a book isn’t a book unless it was written by hand with a quill pen, printed by hand between two inked rollers, bound with a calfskin cover, with print so small...
View ArticleThe dam has been breached! Amazon’s Audible launches an unlimited audiobook...
As and when Amazon decides that Audible shall become an unlimited audiobook subscription service in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, what exactly are publishers going to do about it other than squeal...
View ArticleObama’s new book banned as an audiobook in Sweden – by PRH
To be clear, PRH has not banned the audiobook in Swedish outright, but without revenue from the unlimited streaming services Storytel, Nextory, BookBeat and Bokus Play the audiobook version in Swedish...
View ArticleSo why are algorithms still so bad at recommending books?
Second, however, is the self-perpetuating fallacy that humans are the solution. The simple reality that the person in the book shop recommending books may have a very limited reading range and have no...
View ArticlePhilippines reading crisis has lessons for US/UK literacy
Literacy becomes an educational conveyor belt. This year the class will read this book. Can’t read? No matter. Just sit there bored stiff and disruptive until you’re old enough to leave school. The...
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The Emperor Markus Dohle has no clothes
Asking any publisher to give the keynote speech at a booksellers’ event is a bit like asking a farmer to tell supermarkets how to sell food. And inviting Markus Dohle was a clear case of two steps...
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What’s that? You have $3,660 sitting there gathering dust and don’t know what...
Plus this superb value pie chart, presumably with actual (if still made-up) numbers once you hand over the cash, to show at a glance how well Amazon is doing when it comes to the ebook market. This...
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The courts are not the place to try protect author career paths. Joseph...
IP laws already exist. They exist to protect intellectual property, not to protect creator careers. Creator careers are carved by providing content the consumer desires. There are no job guarantees,...
View ArticleKKR sale of RB Media paves the way for its Simon & Schuster bid. The industry...
Hedge-fund managers have no long-term interest in the industry, any more than book fair hosting companies have. Publishing is incidental, not central, to their thinking. Per the Wall Street Journal,...
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Thad McIlroy on “Why Publishers Must adopt AI”
“This is not a good time to be technology-averse. Artificial intelligence stands to drive significant productivity gains in book publishing processes, from editorial to marketing. The companies that...
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Hedge-fund KKR buys Simon & Schuster. A Gordon Gekko moment or a digital...
KKR CEO Pete Stavros will be listening carefully to Richard Sarnoff, and looking closely at what worked for RBMedia and what is working for OverDrive. The film Wall Street has a lot to answer for. But...
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AI is not the bad guy. We need to stop demonising our most precious tool and...
Moral indignation is cheap. The outrage at the use of AI to disadvantage Jane Friedman speaks volumes. That wicked AI! How dare it? Let’s ban this evil technology before it’s too late! While many book...
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US – print book sales continue to decline. So where is the #BookTok boom the...
And yet book sales are down. Meaning a) that 4.176 billion of those BookTok views resulted in no sales, and b) those 24 million sales that did happen were not additional sales for the industry. They...
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Publishers rejoice as FTC grapples with the Frankenstein’s monster the...
When it comes to playing the victim card and putting on raucous demonstrations of self-righteous indignation, the publishing industry is in a historic glass house and really cannot afford to throw too...
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The AI revolution will be good for publishing whether we like it or not....
One of the biggest obstacles to AI in publishing right now is that infernal legal ruling that needs striking out so AI companies can, with due respect for and partnership with human authors, take...
View ArticleSince Afghanistan banned girls from school, its book trade has plummeted 50%....
Today, there’s very little we outside the country can meaningfully do to alter the course of Afghanistan’s near-future trajectory, but it would be reassuring to see the global publishing industry at...
View ArticleNo sign of Gordon Gekko as KKR-owned Simon & Schuster announces new Board
“I don’t throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun-tzu, The Art of War. Every battle is won before it is ever fought” – Gordon Gekko, Wall Street. Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street has a...
View ArticleDoes reading print texts really improve comprehension 6-8 times more than...
So exactly how often does the average person read social media texts on paper? Reading print improves comprehension far more than looking at digital text, say researchers. A study from the University...
View ArticlePhonics – A ticking time-bomb for English-language publishers
In 2019 one in four children were leaving primary school unable to read properly. In England, the home of the English-language. In a recent op-ed looking at publishing in Ghana, I touched on the...
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Everyone in the publishing industry should be watching CES this month....
How many of us today are doing our job in the same way it was done late last century? More importantly, how many of us today are doing jobs that even existed last century? “This Year’s CES Will...
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