There has been a rush of article added to my Writings about e-book publishing, 2008 over the last 5 or 6 weeks. So much so, that it is already approaching the length of last year's page! The last item to be added, an article by Laura Dawson in Book Business, comes from a journal newly available in electronic mode (to which you must subscribe, ...

I often write about reading in this blog; it is a fairly natural - even logical - progression or collocation for anyone thinking about information, books or libraries. In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr wonders if - like the Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico [who, after Gutenberg's printing press] worried that the easy availability ...

I do not really like quoting at length in my blog entries, but the article that I am referencing here is such an important article from the house of a major publisher, that I think it is warranted. Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan Digital Publishing has written an article linked from the company blog, the digitalist: A book publisher’s manifesto for ...

… and what does Ray Bradbury mean when he says that There is no future for e-books because they are not books at BookExpo America When, or indeed, why is a book not a book? If we take digitized version of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, or even of his Fahrenheit 451, and present it on-screen, surely we have an electronic or digitized version ...

The Kathleen Fitzpatrick article I referred to in my last posting, talks about ''the tyranny of the book'' (Stallybrass) and ''bookness'' - her word for what I have called 'book-like'. She notes: Stallybrass suggested, almost as an aside, that the book is a production, finally, of the binder. This is a point I’d like to dwell on a bit, as it ...

''If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.'' Ronald Reagan ''Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.'' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Richard Charkin has reported in VAT on print that the European Commission is trying to bring the UK into line with most other EU ...

On the heels of a conference about publishing which explored what publishers and libraries each feel about publishing in an electronic/digital/virtual/open environment - and with my last post, Is e-publishing THE solution? in mind - we come to piece in Guardian Unlimited by Beth Webb. Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age post, Books? Who needs ...

Staying with a musical theme (David Bowie, this time) e-books have been hitting high spots - as witnessed by several recent postings here, and also by one of the many postings from the SLA Conference in Denver: E-Books on Steroids. A resurgence of US interest in e-books was demonstrated by a packed room (“This has been the explosion year for ...

In a 2006 talk to the Internet Advertising Bureau in London, Bill Gates said that we would be paperless within 10 years. Now - according to two reports of the Microsoft annual Strategic Account Summit (from Print is Dead blog and IWR's feed) - he has reduced this to five years. Gates had rather strong feelings on the subject. “Reading is going to ...