A recent US survey commissioned by the children’s books publisher Scholastic found that 65% of 6-11 year olds prefer to read print books even when e-books are available on tablets. In the UK, a National…
Two initiatives aimed at getting children to learn and read more have just launched with a flourish. The $15m Global Learning Xprize pits teams of innovators across the world in a competition aiming to…
In what is fast becoming a regular negotiating tactic, Amazon has halted pre-orders of DVDs and Blue-Ray discs of some Disney movies. This includes titles such as “Maleficent,” and “Captain America: The…
The public clash between Hachette and Amazon has been making headlines for a while now, most recently around J K Rowling’s latest novel. Amazon bowed to consumer pressure after complaints that the book…
What place do e-readers – and in particular ebooks – hold in the reading behaviour of Australia’s 10 million public library borrowers? There are some 181 million items loaned every year by the nation’s…
Tap on me, click on me, publish me! We live in an era of a digital selfie obsession. There is a growing tendency to create self-centred digital environments. You only need to look at a few Facebook profiles…
Mills & Boon, the guilty pleasure of many a reader over the decades, is shunning the Kindle in favour of launching its own app. You can now download your favourite bodice ripper and read it discreetly…
A furious debate has been raging for some years now between adults. Are you a Kindle lover or a devotee of the good, old-fashioned book? As the e-book spreads into children’s publishing, some look in terror…
As a book designer, I’m often asked whether I think printed books have a future. Short answer: yes, but it’s complicated. The future of print question is often followed by a declaration of love for tangible…
My new year’s resolution is to read less, more deeply. By this, I mean that I aim to break my habit of skimming multiple texts at a time; to focus on reading one thing from start to finish, before moving…
I’ve nominated these eBooks as notable publications in 2013 based on three criteria. First, I enjoyed reading them enough to finish the whole text on a digital device. Second, they use the digital format…
There is a section early in Richard House’s transmedia novel The Kills – published this year by Pan Macmillan and long-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize – in which the protagonist, Ford, is on the run…
Put simply, typography is the art of making language visible: designing what words look like on a page or screen. Before desktop computing, typography was a specialised trade. Now, anyone with access to…
As a professional book designer, I’ve spent a decade observing electronic books from a cagey distance. A couple of years ago, I reluctantly recognised the need to engage with these alien book forms, both…
A print designer by trade, I resisted eBooks until a single publication won me over: an edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land designed for the iPad, jointly produced in 2011 by publisher Faber and Faber…