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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While book lovers console each other with anecdotes about how hard it is to beat the experience of a real book, it seems that they’re already telling researchers a different story. A new usability study by leading usability researcher Jakob Nielsen lined up the printed book against digital editions on the Kindle, iPad and PC. [...]

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Amazon has just split its ebook top 100 list into a Free and a Paid list, giving much more useful insight into what people are buying and reading digitally. To me, the most interesting thing is it shows is that the classics — the traditional fare of free reading — have some serious competition from new [...]

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Top six US publisher Simon and Schuster, a division of CBS, broke out its digital numbers from its first quarter results to show an impressive year-on-year growth of 233% to US$12 million, up from just US$3.6M in Q1 2009 .  The figure includes ebooks, audio downloads and standalone apps. While these numbers are still small [...]

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Just days after the launch of Apple’s iPad, it might be time for starry-eyed publishers to take a reality check from their iPad infatuations. Apple has just made the content business much harder. The reason is an escalation in Apple’s long-running battle with Adobe over its Flash platform. Apple’s latest move bans any content generated [...]

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