At this week's conference of the Independent Publishers' Guild, Jo Forshaw talked about the way in which the audio market is opening up, beginning to provide a challenge to ebooks. Read more
Newly released figures show that ebook revenues in the US have declined again. In the first half of 2017, e-book sales declined by 4.6%, according to the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies. All other categories, apart from paperback books saw increased revenues in the same time period. Read more
Mixed fortunes for world's 50 largest publishers are shown in a recent report but more recent figures for US audio downloads show that they have been booming. Read more
Good news all round this week, with spectacular audiobook sale increases in the US and surprising figures showing that Millennials are the most likely generation of Americans to use public libraries. In the UK children's titles are continuing to outperform the market. Read more
Not content with deciding they prefer print books to ebooks, young people are further confounding expectations by showing a growing enthusiasm for audiobooks. Read more
According to some sources, the audiobook market is growing rapidly. Orion audio publisher Pandora White called the sector "the fastest-growing in publishing" and Booktrack is growing exponentially, but is the quality of the recordings being sacrificed in order to achieve the lowest price? Read more
Audiobooks have long been the Cinderellas of the publishing business, with many anticipated new dawns which have failed to produce much bigger sales. Read more
The recent news of the $300m (£153m) Amazon purchase of Audible, the digital audiobooks site, has made it the market leader. At a stroke this gives the Internet retailer a ready-made subscriber base and access to 80,000 spoken word titles which it can sell through all its channels, including its new Kindle e-book reader. Read more
Audiobooks are finding a new market amongst the iPod generation.Last week News Review looked at recent developments in audio, including rental, but it is downloads which offer the biggest growth opportunities. Read more
'Technology is shifting more power to the hands of authors, who now have more options for what they can do with their manuscripts. Everything from the choice of publishing channels, to content formats, but also increasing the quality of their content using tools which perhaps would have been cost prohibitive to them in the past. Authors also want to reach as large an audience as possible.
When bookstores across the United States closed last spring, Tyrrell Mahoney, the president of Chronicle Books, braced for disaster as she watched revenue plummet. Then, months into the crisis, Chronicle found an unlikely savior: the rapper Snoop Dogg and his two-year-old cookbook. Read more
Another shoe falls today (April 15), as London Book Fair announces that it will, after all, resort to an all-digital 2021 evocation, giving up on what organizers had hoped could be a physical staging at Olympia London. The dates, having been moved from March to the early summer, are retained this year as June 29 to July 1, but earlier additional dates are being added. Read more
The Bologna Children's Book FairThe Bologna Children's Book Fair or La fiera del libro per ragazzi is the leading professional fair for children's books in the world. has cancelled this year's physical events and will go digital-only owing to the coronavirus pandemic.
On Thursday, James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, gave the keynote address at the Independent Book Publishers Association's annual IBPA Publishing University, where he was in conversation with Karla Olson, publisher of Patagonia Books and IBPA chair. Read more
I was talking, as one does, to the Reader on the Clapham Omnibus. I told him I was about to have a new book out after a 10-year gap. He was pleased to hear it, and he asked: "So, what made you decide to start writing again?"
"I didn't."
He looked a little confused.
I told him: "I never stopped."
His brow cleared. "Ah, it's one of these thousand-page doorstoppers?" Read more
In November 1971, a debut novel from a young author was published, to a small but not insignificant splash. Set in a world of tiny people who live in a carpet, it was described by the book trade journal Smith's Trade News as "one of the most original tots' tomes to hit the bookshops for many a decade", while Teachers' News called it a story of "quite extraordinary quality".
Growing up in 1980s Glasgow amid a working class beaten down by Thatcherism, Shuggie Bain watches as his family becomes increasingly broke and broken; his mother Agnes' alcoholism drags her into a pit of despair, no matter how hard poor Shuggie loves her. Oh, and Shuggie is clearly gay - even if he doesn't understand that at first - and is badly and endlessly bullied for it.
In 1972, Avon Books published "The Flame and the Flower," by Kathleen Woodiwiss - a hefty historical romance that traded chastity for steamy sex scenes. It arrived in the thick of the sexual revolution, and readers loved it: It was an instant bestseller that's credited with birthing the modern romance genre. Read more
Our resident online creative writing tutor Eliza Robertson shares five top tips for writing a short story and techniques for developing your writing skills.
All of the UK's children's laureates, including Cressida Cowell, Quentin Blake, Malorie Blackman and Michael Rosen, are uniting to call for the government to dedicate £100m a year to revitalising "deteriorating" primary school libraries across the country, amid fears that literacy levels have dropped severely during the pandemic. Read more
As someone who has published (twice) with a hybrid press, I've become aware that there's a lot of confusion about what the term means and how hybrid publishing really works.