Newspapers and magazines are still trying to figure out how to cash in on the huge digital growth that the humble book is experiencing. So this piece from Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics and respected digital thinker for the newspaper industry got me thinking about which publishers — newspapers, magazines or books — will stand the best [...]

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A plan to create a vast digital library by scanning millions of books without explicit copyright permission has been thrown out in a long-awaited ruling issued today by New York District Court Judge Denny Chin. The ruling concerned the long running Google Books Settlement, a class action orginally started in 2005 when authors and publishers [...]

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HarperCollins’ US unit has just changed its long-standing ebook policy for library sales. Instead of selling ebooks for a one-time cost and allowing libraries to lend these ebooks in perpetuity, HarperCollins amended its terms to limit a purchase to 26 loans. For an average 2-week lending term, libraries would get a full year of lending [...]

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The latest US book industry sales figures from the Association of American Publishers show ebooks are now tracking at 9% of domestic trade book revenue for the 8-month period January to August 2010. This is up from 3.3% market share for the same period in 2009. To add some further perspective on how rapid this [...]

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The following article was published in the latest Australian Booksellers Association magazine. I wrote it a couple of months ago and some of the UK moves have been affected by the change of government. (The Digital Economy Act 2010 passed by the previous government did include Section 43 which amends copyright for some public library [...]

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