From the inbox:
Good afternoon,
Earlier today, the Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, announced a review of the Government of Canada’s foreign investment policy for the book industry.
The Revised Foreign Investment Policy in Book Publishing and Distribution, working in conjunction with the Investment Canada Act, sets conditions for foreign investment in the [...]
Every November, hundreds of thousands of writers commit themselves to the maddest of madnesses: writing a 50,000-word novel in one month, for Nanowrimo, the National Novel Writing Month.
It’s a time of creativity, chaos, angst, nerves, procrastination, excitement, and sheer folly, a colossal celebration of passion for the written word.
It’s also a time, let’s face it, [...]
Do you like ebooks? Check this out:
Inkmesh is an ebook search engine that collects data from multiple websites to make it easier to find new and interesting ebooks in the right format and at the right price.
Here’s a typical entry, this one for Murakami’s After Dark:
UK indie publisher Marion Boyers is no more:
“Without Borders [being so active], the whole retail end is uneven. You have one company dominating the high street, one online, so it’s impossible for independent publishers to budget with any kind of confidence”.
She added the costs of marketing a book that was shortlisted for an award [...]
Jon Udell is one of the great thinkers about technology, particularly about how technology can be used to do useful things in society. He was one of the first “famous” fans of LibriVox.
So I was happy to be able to talk to Jon on IT Conversations this week about Book Oven. You can listen [...]
From Mark, at Smashwords, Risk Shifts to Authors:
In my last post, I wrote an allegory on why book publishing is like venture capital. Publishers, in exchange for investing their cash, talent and connections, become part owners of the author’s book project. Authors agree to share ownership in exchange for the privilege of publication and the [...]
For you top 10 nuts:
In our modern, scientific world it is sometimes easy to forget that human progress often comes attached to some spectacular intellectual clashes between different ways of looking at things and differing interpretations of what is seen. There have been some notable intellectual mind-fights over the millennia, the following are ten such [...]
Part of the reason that sales are so low from publishers’ web sites is that, in general, they’ve never put much effort into making their websites attractive to buyers of books, or, for that matter, to Google.
When I hear publishers say: people don’t want to buy from a publisher’s site, I’m always a bit puzzled. [...]
My apologies, I was in NYC for a whirlwind tour at Tools of Change for Publishing (more to come on that soon), and somehow I have not hit the publish button for a few days.
But the regular blogging schedule shall resume forthwith.
