The future's bright, the future's mobile
In the final part of his report on this year’s London Book Fair Digital Conference, Alastair Horne considers the impact of mobile on the publishing industry.
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eBooks
2010: A Publishing Odyssey
Über-agent Andrew “the Jackal” Wylie has hatched an audacious plot. Or maybe he has just seen the future. Either way, he has disintermediated the publishers he works with – for ebooks at least. With last week’s launch of Odyssey Editions, his Kindle-only ebook imprint, a range of his authors are now available digitally for the first time. To me, this seems inevitable. Many authors and their agents get the new digital realities – and, more importantly, the opportunities – while too many publishing discussions still focus on a protectionist response to the ‘threat’ of digital. If publishers won’t grasp digital, authors and agents will.
Read MoreRoads? Where we're going, we don't need roads
There is a lack of skills in the publishing industry to deal with new emergent paradigms. But it’s not just skills and structure that are lacking, but culture and attitude. In a period of accelerating change we need vastly more efficient methods of developing new concepts. In this post I want to share some thoughts about some of the changes that would be required for publishers to become more agile, generalist and collaborative in an age where we are all becoming publishers, authors, creators and consumers and as such all have a voice and opinion as well as the ability to implement our own ideas.
Read MoreKarmic Rights Management
In case you hadn’t realised before the announcement of the Apple iPad in January, this is the decade of the eReader. The publishing industry is going through a similar transition to that of the music industry in the last decade.
In these days when you can publish direct for ereaders like the Kindle, Cool-er and soon the iPad – or just blog a story – what’s to stop anyone stealing and copying your work illegally?