In the weeks before the curtain falls on 2016, editors and reporters are madly making lists – not of gifts they wish for, but of stories from the last twelve months they can’t forget or stop talking about. 2016 has made an indelible mark, of course – in politics, in war, in sports, and in […]

“The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.” Unhappily, many working in the publishing industry know too well how swiftly this wry observation can become true. The best way to keep your job in publishing is to open your mind to new ideas, says Ted Hill, chair of the Digital Book […]

“The election of Donald Trump was not only a shock to the nation, but also to publishers, and many are now pivoting to put some books on Trump, and America in the Age of Trump, onto their Spring 2017 lists,” reports Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly senior writer. “Atlantic Monthly has what is very likely to prove a bestseller—How the […]

A visit to the local library is a common ritual for families with young children. Even the smallest library’s shelves are stocked with many an armful of story books for bedtime. In developing countries across Africa, the physical library is a rare enough sight. Books themselves are a luxury, even where literacy rates may be […]

Throughout the long and contentious US presidential election campaign, a nation’s attention was fixed on reading tweets and emails. Three weeks after the surprise result that will take Donald Trump to the White House for the next four years, publishers and booksellers alike now hope Americans will want to read something – anything – else. […]

At the National Book Awards on Wednesday night, the program ran a close second to the winning authors for its diversity and its high entertainment quotient. The evening’s master of ceremonies, Larry Wilmore, brought to the gala the same sharp wit he had shown as host of The Nightly Show on Comedy Central. Yet the […]

For taking on the challenge of Open Access, the real heroes are publishing professionals like Raegel De Guzman of BMJ Group in London. In the last year alone, BMJ has launched seven new Open Access journals, including one that is wholly-owned by a society. De Guzman says the path to success has relied on a […]

Equal parts mathematician and political activist, Cathy O’Neil has calculated the impact of algorithms on society.  For the most part, she says, big data adds up to big trouble. When it comes to human activities, algorithms are expected to be models of objectivity, owing to their basis in mathematical formulae and reliance on enormous quantities […]

Born in a world before smartphones and tablets, the Books in Browsers conference was once aptly named, as it concentrated on reading online. In 2016, of course, digital reading is about much more than books and browsers. After a one-year hiatus that allowed organizers to rethink the focus, the two-day conference returned last week to […]

In May, Copyright Clearance Center acquired UK-based Ixxus to help harness the power of content and licensing. Together, CCC and Ixxus are now working with publishers to develop a “content-fi­rst” strategy that combines advanced semantic enrichment, a “single source of truth” content repository, and other exciting tools, says CCC CEO Tracey Armstrong, who spoke about […]