It’s rare that a national industry is confronted with a single threat to its future. That just happened to South African publishing. A few days ago, the South African department of basic education (DBE) released a policy document, for public comment, that explains how the DBE would like to handle textbooks going forward. (If you’re […]
Arthur Attwell
Arthur Attwell is a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, co-founder of Electric Book Works and Bettercare, and founder of Paperight. He lives in Cape Town. On Twitter at @arthurattwell.
Posted inBusiness
Oops, you just gave your invention to Telkom
“UPDATE, 8 Nov 2013: Telkom have now changed the rules of the competition, and no longer require entrants to cede or licence their IP. Here’s the media release [http://www.telkom.co.za/about_us/mediacentre/press_release/articles/2013/article_1216.html] It’s not clear yet whether Telkom will cede IP back to entrants where they’ve already ceded IP to Telkom. I’d encourage anyone who entered the competition […]
Posted inGeneral
Woman gives birth to child
When my wife Michelle gave birth to our first child, Aidan, last year, I learned some things about the world. I learned that nature doesn’t take prisoners. That labour wards are only pragmatic places, designed to extract one human being from another. And that every news headline, every day, should read ”Woman gives birth to […]
Posted inTech
Tech spreads slowly
This is a story of how my ego taught me a hard lesson in entrepreneurship. I used to work for some really big publishing companies, till in 2006 I left them to co-found an ebook production company. I thought ebook technology was moving fast, and that I was just in time to catch the ebook […]
Posted inTech
Amazon’s e-book disappearing act
If you haven’t heard, in an Orwellian faux pas Amazon recently deleted (and refunded) purchased copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from its customers’ Kindle e-readers. It was the wake-up call the anti-DRM lobby was probably hoping for, and it’s raised a storm of discussion (and confusion) about the evil that is digital rights management. […]
Posted inGeneral
Tools of change: News from ebooks’ biggest conference
The annual O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference has just closed in New York and as usual it was a digital-publishing feast. Though I didn’t get to go myself, the flood of blogging and tweeting that came from the conference kept me happy right until my brain exploded. Though more time would improve my […]
Posted inGeneral
How to stay in publishing in a digital world
As more and more of our world is digitised — sales, maps, encyclopaedias, books, music, phone calls, radio, TV, you name it, it travels digitally — companies constantly have to choose what to automate and what has to be done by human beings. In other words, what can be templated, and what requires project-specific creative […]
Posted inGeneral
Ebook distribution and the problems of aggregation
The internet, and particularly the ebook industry, is littered with debates about aggregation and monopoly, and in many of those debates the two concepts are confused. Let’s be clear: aggregation is good, monopoly is bad. For instance, a serious discussion is finally emerging over the Google Books settlement, a discussion that recognises the value of […]
Posted inGeneral
Is there such a thing as an ebook designer?
Here in the ebook-making world there’s a lot of to and fro about how much design matters when text is getting reflowed in different screens and applications, from tiny phones to 22-inch LCDs. Will book designers have jobs in a publishing world dominated by ebooks? A few years ago when Mobipocket dominated the ebook market, […]
Posted inGeneral
Interstitial reading: The new cereal-box moment
What do you do with those wasted minutes in a queue, waiting for a train or a meeting, or staring at the cereal box wishing there was something new to read there? I usually reach for my phone to read, in an activity that’s come to be called “interstitial reading”. Over at Tools of Change, […]
Posted inGeneral
Finally, Google can put millions of books online
On October 28 2008, Google announced a huge development in the course of its work with books. It is potentially the biggest single development in the book industry since the founding of Amazon. As a result of a settlement agreement in a class action suit involving authors, publishers and libraries, which has been hanging over […]
Posted inGeneral
The ebook scramble
Much of the buzz at Frankfurt Book Fair this year was about ebooks, and particularly the impact that the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader have had on that part of the industry over the last year. According to IDPF spokesperson Michael Smith, ebook sales this year are up 53% in the US, and for August […]