The annual O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference has just closed in New York and as usual it was a digital-publishing feast. Though I didn't get to go myself, the flood of blogging and tweeting that came from the conference kept me happy...
As more and more of our world is digitised -- sales, maps, encyclopaedias, books, music, phone calls, radio, TV, you name it, it travels digitally -- companies constantly have to choose what to automate and what has to be done by human beings. In oth...
The internet, and particularly the ebook industry, is littered with debates about aggregation and monopoly, and in many of those debates the two concepts are confused. Let's be clear: aggregation is good, monopoly is bad.
For instance, a serious d...
Here in the ebook-making world there's a lot of to and fro about how much design matters when text is getting reflowed in different screens and applications, from tiny phones to 22-inch LCDs. Will book designers have jobs in a publishing world domina...
Much of the buzz at Frankfurt Book Fair this year was about ebooks, and particularly the impact that the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader have had on that part of the industry over the last year. According to IDPF spokesperson Michael Smith, ebook sales...
A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to take part in a writing project, organised by Darren Gorton. His plan was to bring 13 of South Africa's most passionate bloggers together and have them each contribute a chapter to an online book / series. The t...
There is a new technology in our midst, and once again old-school thinking is about to get a serious shake-up.
Kindle is a new gadget, available from Amazon.com, that allows digital books to be downloaded and read on the go. The device is sexy, s...
For the past 10 years I have been trying to read Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before and, although it is not a particularly long book, reading it from cover to cover has been a bitter struggle.
First, some context: Eco is my favourite aut...
