I have just been reading a short editorial piece by Patrick Tucker in The Futurist: The 21st Century Writer. It is a reflective piece on Tim O’Reilly’s “Tools of Change” conference, and focusses on publishing in an electronic age. Unsurprisingly. For the serials publisher and the journalist, there is the thought that with half the world reporting ...

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 ...

Thanks to Joe Wikert at Kindleville for the following: Mobipocket for the iPhone/iTouch Earlier this morning Kevin Tofel wrote a blog post about how there will be a Mobipocket app for the iPhone later this year. He then went on to question what sort of impact this will have on the Kindle. A couple of readers commented that a) the reading ...

CILIP members will already be aware from the CILIP LIS in Politics blog that - in response to a supplementary question from Tony Baldry on the protection of copyright in relation to e-books, and on piracy - Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Andy Burnham said that with respect to e-books: there was a genuine issue with the illegal sharing of ...

In a 2006 keynote paper, Michael Jon Jenson, wrote that - having previously forecast the end of paper books, he had discovered that he was wrong: My fundamental error was in thinking that technology was the driver, rather than the human culture using the new technologies. So are we humans really incapable of learning new tricks, of moving on, of ...

I was reading a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review by Ezra Klein, The Future of Reading, which explores his experiences with a Kindle, and - more generally - with reading on something that is not paper-based. Klein quotes William Powers’s brilliant essay “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal,” (pdf) which considers the evolution of paper ...

The UK JISC Scholarly Communications Working Group commissioned a report, delivered recently (March 2008) by Key Perspectives Ltd on Key Concerns within the Scholarly Communications Process (Word doc). The report was asked to produce a ‘big picture’ overview of scholarly communication at the present time, exploring with researchers and other ...