Amazon's latest figures are astounding and cement its dominance of the book business, particularly self-publishing, as well as the huge inroads it is making in many other areas. Read more
World Poetry Day has been marked by the publication of some encouraging sales figures from the UK, showing sales up 16% on last year in the first quarter. But a lot of these sales seem to be driven by social media and to feature poets who are appealing to a young female audience. Read more
The news that Scribd is reining back on successful erotica and romance titles exposes the weak link in the subscription model of bookselling. Read more
So what are the chances of the just-launched German online book retailer and e-reader, backed by bookstore chains Thalia, Weltbild and Hugendubel, Deutsche Telekom, and giant German publisher Bertelsmann providing a real challenge to Amazon? Read more
Last week's annual Books and Consumers research from Bowker showed some interesting trends in book-buying both in the UK and the US. In 2012 British consumers bought 296m books, compared to 288m in 2011, but for the fifth year in a row spend declined from £2,137m ($3.226) to £2.1086 ($3.182) as the lower prices for ebooks started to affect the overall price mix. Read more
‘My father was a playwright so I grew up with reverence for writing. The sound of his typewriter clacking was one I grew to love. What I didn't know was how disappointed he was by the failure of his work to reach the West End. Later, I realised not all writing careers end in disappointment, and it was worth trying to make mine a success...
Organizers of the United Kingdom's TS Eliot Prize had planned to hold its shortlisted poets' readings at London's Royal Festival Hall on January 10 and an awards ceremony on the 11th. Read more
Over the weekend fanfiction website Archive of our Own went down, to the dismay of fanfic readers everywhere. While it's not the result of any one fic, despite what some fans thought, it's a reflection of how much the pandemic has changed our fanfiction reading habits.
When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, the press coverage was overwhelming. The trusted book publishing media, including Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/, Publishing Perspectives, Publishers Lunch, The Bookseller in the U.K. and Quill & Quire in Canada, each did a fine job of monitoring developments within publishing and bookselling. Read more
There are a ton of book-to-movie adaptations coming our way this year, even exceeding this list. Those that do not have set dates yet we've omitted, such as YA sequels To All The Boys: Always and Forever, Lara Jean, After We Fell and crime action flick Tom Clancy's Without Remorse starring Michael B. Jordan. Here's just about every major movie you might want to crack open a book for in 2021
While I was planning my current novel and annotating that plan, I asked myself a series of questions in the annotations. I know I'm not the only one to make notes on a draft in the form of questions, but until recently I wasn't aware that I was creating problems for myself by not categorizing the questions.
Bernardine Evaristo, the Booker prize-winning novelist, is heading a major project to republish books by black British writers that generally disappeared without trace before they could receive the recognition they deserved. Read more
From Michael Hansen's perspective, the textbook industry is having a Spotify moment.
The chief executive of Cengage, a leading publisher, brought up the music streaming service on an investor call last month, in reference to a question about the future of physical textbooks. Read more
Book burning has not historically been considered an anti-fascist gesture. But in the wake of the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington DC by crazed Trump supporters, perhaps that's set to change. Read more