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News stories from the book world in April 2009

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April 2009

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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

Turning non-readers into readers

20 April 2009

Recent rather disturbing figures have revealed that there is a potential market of 20 million potential readers in the UK who do not read books. In the US a recent survey revealed that one in four Americans didn't read a single book last year. So who are these huge potential markets and can anything be done to activate them?   Read more

Book sales - volume up, value down

13 April 2009

This year's Book Marketing Limited study Books and Consumers in 2008 showed some worrying trends in book purchasing in the UK, whilst demonstrating that books have fared comparatively well compared to music and DVDs. Volume purchases of both of the latter grew much faster than books, but both of them suffered from a huge drop in price - averages of 23% for DVDs and 34% for music.<  Read more

Large print breakthrough

6 April 2009

Working with the Publishers' Licensing Society, the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the UK has initiated and funded Focus, an £800,000 ($1,187) project to publish large print books. It is publishing the books in association with BBC Audiobooks, Penguin, Random House and HarperCollins.  Read more