Thirty years ago, when I was a rookie editor at Oxford University Press, there were quite serious discussions within that august organisation about electronic publishing. I remember being astonished when the then Finance Director, now deceased, wondered aloud whether it was wise to be building a new warehouse facility at Corby if the whole market for books was to be computerised by digital editions within five years.
At the time (this was when the standards for CD ROMs were still … Keep Reading
We have been working for some months with a way of selectively revealing content. Our internal codeword for this system has been ‘petticoats’, the idea being that there are some layers in the system which can publishers can raise to reveal more content.
Time Out City Guides can only be viewed in their 16 pp thumbnail format. But the text of the whole book is searchable.
Some of our other titles are viewable as double-page spreads throughout, and we also … Keep Reading
Yesterday I bought myself Stanza and Classics from the iPhone ApStore. Stanza was free, gives me free access to a lot of books and samples, and the Classics collection cost me 99c. So it wasn’t an expensive day. They both work fine. I will read some of The Time Machine in the Stanza format, and some of Paradise Lost with the mildly annoying page-flip in the Classics reader. Since I havent read too much H G Wells or Milton in … Keep Reading
The Register has a tantalizing and extraordinary glimpse of a ‘new’ Samsung device, which is both a mobile phone and a fold-out 5″ digital viewer. Here is a YouTube of the device clamped in a showcase at a trade show:
The market for mobile phones and similar (or dissimilar) devices will explode in the next three years. They will be a lot smarter and more content aware than today’s models. Publishers are not yet thinking hard about these potential markets. … Keep Reading
What would Google do? I think that the CEO of any magazine company should ask themselves this question. We are now in a really tough recession. Advertising is getting scarce, shrinking in print and going to the web. Subscriptions are tough. News stand sales are tougher. Magazines and periodicals are explicitly excluded from the scope of the Google Settlement with the Authors and Publishers. But what would Google do with magazines?
The short answer is that Google would not be … Keep Reading
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