By Edward Nawotka In today’s lead story about Neal Stephenson’s The Mongoliad, writer Michael Bhaskar asserts that the projects represents “the next business model for publishing.” The project enlisted a team of top writers, working with computer programmers and business development personnel, to create an elaborate and sophisticated ‘verse in what, ultimately, amounts to an open-ended “conversation” with readers. Unlike a …
November Highlights from Publishing Perspectives
It’s Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, when retailers (traditionally) hope to reach profitability and consumers stretch their credit cards to the breaking point. So, whether you’re out standing in line to take advantage of an “door buster” deal or have opted to stay at home and wait for Cyber Monday instead, here is a list of highlights from …
Screaming Metal Phoenix: The Fantastic Rebirth of Humanoids USA
By Daniel Kalder The idea of comics for adults exploded in the US in the mid 1980s, via the pioneering work of creators such as Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Art Spiegelman. Their use of the medium to explore adult themes (or in Miller’s case, adolescent themes) seemed revolutionary at the time, and comics like Watchmen, The Dark Knight and …
Forrester’s James McQuivey Says Digital Publishing is About Economics, Not Format
By Hannah Johnson Last week, James McQuivey of Forrester Research wrote a blog post summarizing Forrester’s new five-year forecast for e-books in the USA, which predicts that digital book sales would reach $3 billion by 2015, thus drastically altering the publishing industry. In this post, McQuivey also predicted that digitization will happen “faster in book publishing than in any other …
Nicolas Gary: France’s Digital Man of Letters
By Olivia Snaije In a corner of the traditional, safe and slightly musty world of French publishing, Nicolas Gary, the principal founder of Actualitté, a website and daily newsmagazine on French and international publishing, is a blast of fresh air. The Canadian-born 30-year old, a fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune but also of poet Saint-John Perse, founded Actualitté with three …
Does Digital Publishing Constitute a New Art Form?
By Edward Nawotka In today’s lead story Nicholas Gary — one of the co-founders of the French literary website Actualitté — notes that in the digital age: “We’ll write about love, but differently. The themes will remain the same . . . A friend introduced me to a new application for the iPhone which is a Japanese garden. You can …
Publishers Training Abu Dhabi, Day 3: All About Digital
By Salwa Shakhshir SalwaShakhshir, a children’s book publisher from Amman, Jordan, is attending the second annual Publishers Training program organized by KITAB and The Center for Publishing at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies in Abu Dhabi. She’s documenting her experiences for Publishing Perspectives. Read coverage of Day 1 and Day 2. Day 3, Publishers Training, Abu …
Digital to Represent 20 to 28% of Publishing’s Profits, says Forum d’Avignon/Bain & Co. Report
By Edward Nawotka A new study, “Publishing in the Digital Era,” commissioned by the Forum d’Avignon and compiled by Bain & Co. states that e-readers, tablets other digital reading devices “could be in the hands of 15 to 20% of the developed world’s population by 2015,” and offers an unprecedented opportunity for publishers and authors. The “redistribution of value among …
The Future of Rights: Standards and Shared Metadata
By Emily Williams The paper book is an object of beauty and simplicity. This neat package has allowed books to conceal for many years the increasingly complex tangle of copyrights they each comprise: rights to text and images, limitations by territory and term of contract, restrictions on the reader. Then came the digital transition, books stripped off their paper packages, …
Web 2.0 Publishing with BookRix
By Amanda DeMarco Gunnar Siewert doesn’t come from a publishing background. He worked at Bertelsmann Music Group from 1992 to 2002, a watershed era of “democratization and digitalization” for the music industry that profoundly affected the founding of his Web 2.0 publishing platform, BookRix. Siewert sees BookRix as a MySpace for literature where writers and readers interact without mediation. Talk …