The eBook Revolution: What they are saying

"I have witnessed and participated in the transition of the newspaper industry from letterpress (hot type), to offset (cold type), to computer pagination (no type)." Says John Hayden in an interesting post looking at the future of publishing in a digital landscape. HERE

There is a handy complete beginners guide to eBook HERE

Books are gradually beginning to lose their magical hold over people. Although at first this might seem like an extremely sweeping and highly improbable statement, with every new Kindle purchased or every batch of ebooks either downloaded or uploaded, it gains an additional bit of weight. A article looking at the phyiscal V digital debate HERE

ast year was the year that firmly placed ebooks in the public mind and yet surprisingly it was the Romance segment that was the fastest growing of all genres within this market – at least according to research done by Bowker (as reported by the NYtimes). As an example of this, Barnes & Noble, the popular American retailer, was previously considered a non-entity in the romance market, yet they have recently taken 25% of the segment for ebooks. Quite impressive. The Romance genre was the biggest growing sector of eBook publishing last year. Full story

If you’ve visited any of the popular eBook forums/blogs over the last year or two you’ve likely seen plenty of debates discussing how eBook Readers will only hit the mainstream once they get down below $100, although in more recent months a $50 number has been bantered around (£50 on our side of the pond). This article questions the possibilities of eReaders ever dropping below the £50 mark. HERE

Most people in the industry seem to think that moving over from print to digital is cheap -
The publishing world is going digital, well, its trying. When we think of the costs involved in this the reaction from many people is, “cool, we’ll save loads of money”, but is this really true? Dominique Raccah from Sourcebooks says not.
Dominique has talk before about how Sourcebooks is finding it very costly to go digital and at this years Frankfurt Book Fair, she is making these comments again. I’m not a publisher myself, and I certainly don’t have experience with print publishing. FULL STORY

ePub is the universal format for eBook and yet Amazon do not allow the format on their Kindle. Over the last 12 months there has been a huge shift in the eBook world with the introduction of a brand new eBook format called EPUB. It is based on open standards, XHTML, XML, CSS and the ZIP archive container. As a result almost every publisher has adopted this format which now means that when the consumer buys an eBook, they can read it on many different devices now and many many more in the future – good news for the consumer. FULL STORY