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Digital Census has plenty of surprises

9 November 2015

The recent Digital Census 2015 revealed some surprises in the responses. In the book trade in general there's been much talk of a slowdown and reversal in the speed of ebook adoption, accompanied by a revival in the fortunes of print. So what exactly did the Census reveal?  Read more

'Authors and readers to the forefront'

1 August 2011

American author Bob Mayer had published over 40 books with traditional publishers before he decided to take things into his own hands and convert his backlist into ebooks.  Read more

Google and British Library digitisation project

27 June 2011

The British Library and Google have just announced a partnership to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library's collections. Opening up access to one of the greatest collections of books in the world, this demonstrates the Library's commitment to increase access to anyone who wants to do research.  Read more

Ngram wows them all

3 January 2011

A fantastic new tool has become available for anyone interested in using the power of the web to trace word use. Google's Ngram is a digital storehouse which comprises words and short phrases - 500 billion of them from 5.2 million books - contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.  Read more

'Content is being devalued by technology'

3 May 2010

Mike Shatzkin is well-known in the publishing business on both sides of the pond for his visionary and often uncomfortable views of the future.  Read more

Google grabs rights to digitised books

27 April 2009

Google's recent class action settlement in the US will award sweeping rights to manage and sell digitised versions of every work published or made available in the US. The settlement allows Google - which has already digitised more than seven million books - the non-exclusive right to digitise every book published before 5th January this year.  Read more

Digitalisation - opportunity or threat?

10 September 2007

Digitalisation has become such a huge issue in the book world that News Review will be investigating the latest developments over the next two weeks. First, what are publishers doing about it and how will this impact on writers?  Read more

Print on demand comes of age

9 April 2007

Print on demand is coming into its own. At a recent Book Marketing Limited seminar in London entitled Managing the Long Tail, the speakers showed how radically this new technology is transforming publishing and what enormous opportunities it offers publishers and authors.  Read more

Google Book Search plans e-books

12 February 2007

In spite of publishers' and authors' uneasiness, Google Book Search is continuing to come to agreements with libraries and building up its collection of digitised material. The University of California, thought to have the largest research/academic library in the world, has now agreed to contribute selected works from its 100 plus libraries to Google Book Search.   Read more

German publishers take Google to court

12 June 2006

The latest news from Germany is that the Borsenverein (the book trade association) is supporting one large German publishing group in taking Google to court. On 28 June the district court of Hamburg will decide whether to impose an injunction preventing Google digitising content from any of the company's books.  Read more

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29 June 2020 - What's new

June 2020
  • 'Like any social media platform, the more you use Twitter the more you will get out of it. So keeping your account as active as possible - i.e. tweeting as often as possible - is perhaps the most valuable tip of all. But that raises a common anti-Twitter excuse: "Oh, I wouldn't know what to talk about...
  Read more

Why and How Writers Should Embrace Twitter

29 June 2020

Like any social media platform, the more you use Twitter the more you will get out of it. So keeping your account as active as possible-i.e. tweeting as often as possible-is perhaps the most valuable tip of all. But that raises a common anti-Twitter excuse: "Oh, I wouldn't know what to talk about..."
  Read more

‘Books say: she did this because life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own,'

— Julian Barnes

22 June 2020 - What's new

June 2020
  • 'The demands that are made of women can be ferocious, but the demands made of men can be equally tough. I don't know what it is to be a boy. I have a lot of male friends and my best friend when I was nine was a boy, but there is an extra imaginative leap you have to make, I know intricately what it means to be a girl and I don't know who gets to say whether a character is real.
  Read more