| Hachette UK is certainly capitalizing on the success of its digital ebooks and is seeing massive growth. Digital ebooks now represent 25% of trade sales, and fiction titles now account for 30% of the total revenue. It has now been revealed in a letter to United Kingdom based authors that Hachette sees 50% of its entire revenue stream stem from digital book sales through Amazon and other partners. The Arts Council England (ACE) launched a new £1.3m campaign to support libraries, with ten grants available. The Enterprising Libraries project is being funded by ACE, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), and the British Library. Victoria Barnsley has left HarperCollins and Charlie Redmayne, chief executive of Pottermore, will take up the reins. There will be a ton of attention from shareholders on HC, because the newspaper and book publishing divisions are a single entity now and must innovate to make more money. The first annual Kobo Writing Life Scholarship program has just kicked off, in conjunction with The Curtis Brown Agency. It is a three-month novel-writing course that will run from Wednesday the 25th of September to Wednesday the 18th of December in London. It will be led by a number of agents and authors that give creative advice and work with you on a personal basis. The scholarship is aimed at lower income people—struggling young writers perhaps? It normally costs 1,200 quid to attend, so it might be worth it to enter. Last Monday, Random House completed a merger, thereby creating the world’s biggest publisher with control of more than 25% of the global market. Gail Rebuck is one of the most prolific UK publishing executives. She has been running Random House UK since 1991 and has just stepped down. Tom Weldon, the UK chief executive of Penguin, is now the chief executive of the enlarged UK operation. One of the biggest topics at the American Library Association Annual Conference 2013 in Chicago was libraries as retailers. Libraries are, in essence, public bodies that get their funding from local government and federal taxes. That libraries are adding a "Buy It Now" button to their websites is beginning to become a polarizing issue. Some people are in the camp that the small commissions can be used to reinvest into their content acquisitions and others say selling books has no place in the library. Week in Review – The Latest UK Digital eBook News is a post from: E-Reader News |
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Week in Review – The Latest UK Digital eBook News
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment