Category: Books

  • Could Spotify work for ebooks?

    As long term readers will know, I’m amazed by the way in which the music business spent more than ten years missing every business opportunity the Internet brought them, effectively handing their entire business over to the pirates. Services such as Spotify should have turned up a long time ago. Could the same kind of…

  • Will piracy rip the spine out of ebooks?

    Over at Techradar, I’ve interviewed the head of digital at Hachette UK, one of the world’s biggest publishers. Are publishers learning from the music industry’s decade of mistakes? One of the things that sent people to the pirates with music was the problem of file formats: your player wanted X format, the pirate sites had…

  • Buying books online for Xmas? I’d avoid Waterstone’s if I were you

    I’m beginning to suspect that Waterstone’s online isn’t really cut out for the book selling business. The site’s nice. The prices are okay. The selection’s pretty good. That’s all fine. It’s just the getting-books-to-your-house bit that seems to have been designed by complete fucking numpties. I ordered four books in mid-November, three of which were…

  • Michael Connelly on journalists writing books

    I’ve been meaning to post this for ages. In his latest novel The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly makes an interesting point about hacks and books: Deep down, every journalist wants to be a novelist. It’s the difference between art and craft. Every writer wants to be considered an artist. It’s probably the best bit of the…

  • Free isn’t easy

    A superb review of Chris Anderson’s book Free by Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point fame: The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed…

  • Wrote for luck (or: odds and sods I’ve picked up from writing a book)

    I mentioned the other week that I’d written a book and promised to share some of the things I’ve picked up about the writing process, submitting to agents and all that stuff. And then I didn’t. Sorry, it’s been one of those weeks. This is one of those posts for which the phrase “your mileage…

  • The first rule of Write Club is: you don’t talk about Write Club

    Well hello there. Sorry for the lack of non-work postings recently – I mentioned a while back that there was a reason for it, but I didn’t explain what it was. So here we go. For the last five or six months I’ve been killing people. I’ve killed so many people I’ve lost track of…

  • eBooks won’t have a happy ending

    Publishers are getting ready to embrace eBooks. I think they’re making a big mistake. Books aren’t music. You don’t read a book when you’re concentrating on something important, you don’t skip between chapters, books and authors in the space of a few minutes and you don’t need 1,000 different titles to read on the bus.…

  • Amazon’s Kindle: publishers, what the hell are you doing?

    There’s a superb article on Slate about the Kindle – and in particular, the dangers it poses to the book industry. the Kindle locks you down with more rules than the Army Field Manual. The Kindle won’t let you resell or share your books. Anything you buy through the reader is fixed to your Amazon…

  • Kindle 2: meh

    Me, on Techradar: Leaving aside the fact that the paperback book is pretty much perfect, Amazon’s device doesn’t do colour and you’re not going to use a $359 gadget to kill wasps, there are three big problems with it. The first is that despite the redesign, it still looks like something Noddy and Big Ears…