Ebooks need more attention from their publishers

The industry is supposedly embracing a digital future, but too scant attention is too often paid to the basics of organising ebooksThe bright hopes of digital publishing are gathered in London for the latest FutureBook conference and the future looks, well, familiar. As the new boss of HarperCollins, Charlie Redmayne, gave his keynote speech, previewed on this site, one bright spark petulantly tweeted: "This headline is 'news'? Charlie Redmayne: 'publishers must embrace change' #fbook2013 thebookseller.com/news/redmayne-…Redmayne regretted that publishers, "historically … the most innovative and creative of organisations", had lost the plot. "I think that when it came to the digital revolution we came to a point where we stopped innovating and creating. We thought, we've done an ebook and that is what it is."Much the same thought occurred to me at the weekend when a book failed to arrive, forcing me to buy the Kindle edition to mug up for a public event. The book in question was a memoir by the veteran film critic Barry Norman recalling the "53 years 3 months 2 weeks and a day" he spent with his redoubtable wife Diana, before her death two years ago.Not much scope there for digital wizardry, but I would at least have expected some thought to have been put into how the text would flow on a tablet.Perhaps a horror of "widows" (single words at the top of a page) is a bit of a niche hang-up – it's common among old-fashioned print journalists – but, whichever way I tried to... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2013-11-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with: #charlie redmayne

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