Apple made several announcements yesterday which can drive the textbook’s digital transformation — or, in Steve Jobs’ more colourful phrase, its “digital destruction”. My pick is that this will  be the tipping point for educational publishing, its ‘iPod moment’ or ‘Kindle moment’ when the market suddenly takes off. But Apple’s moves will go much further [...]

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Australian bookselling icon Dymocks last week launched a self-publishing service called D Publishing. While the service looks fine, its publishing contract is dreadful. Even if you’re not in Australia, you should look at it to see just how bad a publishing contract can be in the wrong hands. The issue was exposed by The Australian [...]

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The post below was written for the June 2011 issue of the Australian Booksellers Association magazine News on Bookselling. It was written shortly after the rejection by Judge Chin of the Google Books Settlement so it’s somewhat old news. But it did remind me that we haven’t yet heard anything from the parties about what [...]

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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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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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