Amazon's fourth quarter results have just come in $1 billion (£632,62m) short of analysts' expectations, but because of a 55% increase in operating income to $405m (£256m), shares rose 6%. Read more
The New Year has started with a mass of news from the ebook front, where things are really moving very fast. In the States ebook sales surged after Christmas. In the UK the figures show that more than one million ereaders and more than half a million tablet devices were received as gifts over Christmas, with Amazon and Apple the leading suppliers of e-readers and tablets respectively. Read more
Do you want to find out how to publish your work as an ebook? This is something you may be thinking about, in view of the rapid growth in ebook sales. Many authors are suffering from a big contraction in their earnings. Read more
Amazon Kindle sales in the US and UK last year were eight million, making it their biggest selling product ever. An article in the UK's Daily Mail put this down to 'spinsters' buying romance to read on their Kindles (and other e-readers) because they were too embarrassed to be seen reading romances in pubic in book form because of the covers. Read more
The excitement surrounding the arrival of the i-Pad in countries outside the US has caught the attention of the media, reinforcing the idea that a mass audience is waiting to buy one and start using it to read e-books. The arrival of the Kindle aroused similar expectations and many articles presaging the end of the printed book. Read more
This has been one of those weeks when there’s been so much happening that it’s difficult to cover it in a single column. Apple has broken the news of its iPad and, amidst the focus on that, Amazon has already started to fight back. This could be a turning-point and how publishing, books and authors come out of all this is hard to predict. Read more
Is it possible that the short story is at last getting a new lease of life? The form, long beloved of writers, seems to be reaching new audiences through the Internet and benefiting from new opportunities in the form of prizes. Read more
This was the week when, in the middle of an unsurprising Booker and an unremarkable Nobel Prize for Literature, Amazon launched its much-heralded Kindle 2 international edition. Read more
Since News Review last reported on e-books and e-book readers in the spring (News Review 2 March) what's happened to the 'big story' of the book world? Well, everyone's been pretty preoccupied with what else is going on right now, with all eyes on the developing recession and how this is affecting booksellers and publishers. Read more
It may seem like old news now, but News Review has been on holiday so it seems worth tracking back to Amazon's announcement of its new version of the Kindle (see News Review 2 February), which became available last week, only in the US, although wider release is expected to follow soon. Read more
Poets ‘are the great people in literature because they manage to gather thought and feeling, and intellectual and emotional intensity into words in a way that I haven't done in my writing...
An "upbeat" and busy Bologna Children's Book Fair 2025 has seen a marked appetite for shorter and illustrated works - despite there being no runaway book of the fair - though the grim state of geopolitics dimmed many fairgoers' moods.
The global graphic novel market is getting more attention in Bologna this year, with an expanded number of exhibitors and panels dedicated to the topic. "Graphic novels represent one of the most significant growth areas in children's publishing globally," Peter Warwick, CEO of Scholastic, said during a panel celebrating the 20th anniversary of Scholastic's Graphix imprint. Read more
The explosion of generative artificial intelligence technologies, including such large language models as ChatGPT, caught many in the book business off guard when it began in earnest in late 2023. Read more
April is Stress Awareness Month, an initiative designed to put emotional wellbeing at the forefront and a good time to revisit pastoral care in the publishing industry. But how would you, as a publishing professional, know if an author is stressed? And what can you do about it if they are?
Academic publisher Taylor & Francis (T&F) has announced plans to use AI translation tools to publish books "that would otherwise be unavailable to English-language readers".
Meta has used millions of pirated books to develop its AI programmes, as reported in the Atlantic, provoking outcry from many writers and organisations such as the Society of Authors (SoA).
‘I am a crime writer, I understand theft,' said Val McDermid - joining Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Kate Mosse in their appeal to Lisa Nandy to act on their behalf
A number of authors including Richard Osman, Val McDermid, Kate Mosse, Kazuo Ishiguro and Sarah Waters have signed an open letter from the Society of Authors (SoA) demanding that Meta be held to account by the UK government following allegations in the US that authors' works have been used without permission or remuneration to train its artificial intelligence (AI) model.