Figures quoted by China Daily show that publishers in China are benefiting from 300m users of mobile devices who read electronic books. The market is up 25% year on year and reached $1.7 billion in sales last year. Read more
Some sensational figures have just been released showing the trend towards book sales in print form as opposed to ebook is continuing, as sales of consumer ebooks in the UK dropped by a whopping 17%. These figures exclude self-published titles, which have contributed a large proportion of the ebook sales. But more than 50% of genre sales are now reckoned to be in ebook form. Read more
Nielsen has just reported that ebook sales in the US declined a rather surprising 15% in 2016, as compared with 2015. There seem to have been two reasons for this. Read more
Amongst the predictions springing up as we move into the new year, a hard figure is the most astonishing. The slowing-down of ebook sales is well-documented but it is quite startling that the first figure of 2017 is that the UK print market sold 195 million books in 2016, an increase of almost 7% on 2015, and volume increased by 4.5%. Read more
Ebook sales plunged in October 2015, with adult books dropping 22% in one month, compared to children's ebooks which went down a whopping 44.7%. As we've discussed elsewhere, the children's market has a strong preference for print books, with both parents and children preferring them. Read more
This week has yielded some rather unexpected figures from both sides of the Atlantic relating to ebook sales. In the States it looks as if ebook sales are in decline, whereas in the UK there's also a tempering in projections of ebook growth. Read more
Ebook sales growth in the UK seems to be flattening this year. A recent Bowker study showed that digital is taking a much greater proportion of the fiction market than of narrative non-fiction, as in the US. Read more
Amazon's fourth quarter results have just come in $1 billion (£632,62m) short of analysts' expectations, but because of a 55% increase in operating income to $405m (£256m), shares rose 6%. Read more
At last there's some hard information on ebook sales in the UK and an interesting indication of future trends in the US. The Bookseller has managed to put together some ebook sales figures which show that ebook sales in the UK are currently worth around £250m. Read more
Recent figures from Bowker show self-publishing continuing its rapid growth in the US. The number of self-published books coming out has nearly tripled since 2006, with 235,625 new print and ebook titles published in 2011. Read more
‘I always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children's book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
I launched my podcast Making It Up nearly three years ago with the goal of interviewing writers not for any particular work of theirs, but to talk to them about their lives. I didn't want to ask them what famous author they want to have dinner with or what their top five favorite books are ... yech. Read more
Until we have a mechanism to test for artificial intelligence, writers need a tool to maintain trust in their work. So I decided to be completely open with my readers
'It's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.'