Review: A Preparation for Death by Greg Baxter
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Review of Guards! Guards! By Terry Pratchett (Corgi, 1989)
I love Pratchett and Guards! Guards! is pretty damn good.
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September Meeting
Interesting approach here, Company Of Books are dealing with a selection the Booker nominated titles.
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Mockingjay’s Big Opening Sends Scholastic Back to Press
Mockingjay is selling like hotcakes!
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Books and bookmakers
Who’d have think it, 500K a year spent on book betting.
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DLR LIBRARY BLOG
Review for The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
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DLR LIBRARY BLOG
And one for The Help
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“The only way out is through.”
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Kobo is the power behind the Literati by The Sharper Image
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Starting today with the figures for August, and monthly from now on, Irish Publishing News will report the Top Ten Bestselling ebooks through Eason’s ebook store.

Obviously this is only one outlet and the figures for ebook sales are in that way somewhat biased. However until we can secure more sales data from other sources, they’ll remain the best we have.

Interestingly they represent a very different top ten then the weekly print top ten (for the lastest see here). Though this list will cover fiction and non-fiction, no fiction title has made the list.

According to Stephen Boylan, Eason Books Purchasing Manager, the best selling non-fiction title is Matt Cooper’s Who Really Run’s Ireland, but it isn’t selling enough to make the top ten.

Boylan also said, ‘Non-fiction (including academic) is a strong seller, but it tends to be spread across a wider range of titles whereas the new titles in fiction have repeated hits.’

And so, courtesy of Easons, the first Irish Top Ten Ebooks:

1) Pieces of my Heart by Sinead Moriarty
2) The Help by Kathryn Stockett
3) The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
4) The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
5) The Radleys by Matt Haig
6) The Passage by Justin Cronin
7) Legend of a Suicide by David Vann
8) The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
9) Champagne Kisses by Amanda Brunker
10) Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

A rather excellent video featuring Jamie Byng, who’ll be appearing at Mountains To Sea in Dun Laoghaire in September

Upwardly mobile | moving in and what not
And he discusses new digs!
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Book Launch: Renegades: Irish Republican Women 1900-1922
Ann was on Pat Kenny yesterday, interesting book this one.
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Moving on
This really should be read, considered, parsed, filed and re-visited by publishers across the globe. It’s message, however unpalatable, is a vital one!
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Gollancz appoints Nash as digital publisher
On a very selfish level I admire Gollancz as a publisher, if only because they publish some of the finest sci-fi and fantasy.
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Miriam O’Callaghan and Mercier Press title
And why wouldn’t they? (I commissioned Moxie while working at Mercier Press)
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Sell, Socialise and Survive at the Frankfurt Book Fair
Good advice on Frankfurt. IPN will be there so don’t be afraid to send us your stories and releases!
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Edinburgh
Nice note on Edinburgh from Laura!
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Waterstone’s to open bar and restaurants
I think this makes sense, but don’t quote me on it!
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Samsung launches e-reader with W H Smith
When will the ebook and ereading bug bite home here? 
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PW Select: A Quarterly Service for Self-Published Authors to Launch in December
Publishers Weekly will launch a quarterly magazine in December focusing on announcements and reviews of self-published titles. However, listed self-published titles will come at a fee of $149 to the author and reviews will only be on selected titles.
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Publicity for Mercier Press titles
Three of Mercier Press titles were reviewed in national papers at the weekend.
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Reivew: Rules for a Perfect Life by Niamh Greene
IN Rules for a Perfect Life, each of the 27 chapters, like those in some self-help manuals, is headed by a maxim, which will, if followed, apparently change your life for the better.
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Tales of the Burren, and other places
A nice list of new local history titles
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Ireland’s desperadoes of the veld
Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa, 1880-1899, By Charles van Onselen
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Book Club: Tenderwire by Claire Kilroy
An interesting move this!
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Review: Jumping in Puddles by Claire Allan
The Balamory lookalike seaside village of Rathinch may look postcard-perfect to summer visitors. But for locals who live there all year, it is a place of squinting windows, a hotbed of righteous gossip.
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Founder of the Waterstone bookshop chain, Tim Waterstone will join, Jamie Byng, whose publishing house Canongate published Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father and the global success, Life Of Pi, author Matthew Kneale and journalist Rachel Cooke in the Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire to debate the future of reading, writing and books.

The session takes place on Sunday 12th September at 1.45pm as part of Dun Laoghaire Rathdown’s book festival, Mountains To Sea which is entering it’s second year in 2010.

The discussion comes at a time of great change in the world of books and the panel will explore this new digital landscape. With the launch in Ireland of Apple iPad and news that Amazon’s newest Kindle device is both the best selling Kindle ever and the best selling product on Amazon there will be much to discuss.

This article titled “Google’s 130m book count – and ours” was written by Richard Lea, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 9th August 2010 10.09 UTC

So Google have come up with a number, and it’s big. Thanks to the blistering pace of technology, of course, its claim that there are precisely 129,864,880 books in the world will already be just that little bit out of date – but it’s enough to set you thinking. How many of them are any good? How many of them have never been read by anybody other than their author? How many of them are available on the Kindle?

The number itself, naturally, is open to dispute. On the Google Books blog, “software engineer” Leonid Taycher goes into gnarly detail about how they’ve arrived at it, beginning with the question “what is a book?” and going on to investigate issues of duplication, the reliability of sources and the exclusion of “non-books” (microforms, maps, t-shirts with ISBNs – there are around 1,000, apparently). It seems that they’ve given lots of thought to the matter, at any rate, but what we’d like to know is a much more homespun sort of number. How many books can you, personally, put your name to?

Counting the books I’ve got at home is complicated because I’m not there right now, and neither are most of my books (long story), but right here, right now, “filed” on the desk, I’ve got 46 – though I swear that at least three of those have nothing to do with me. In the cupboard across the way I’ve got about another 60, and there are probably a bunch more waiting for me in the post room, so even on this small scale, when we try to come up with a figure, we run into problems. But nevertheless that’s what we want to know: if Google has 130m books, how many do you have?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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One Thousand Casmurros from LiveAD on Vimeo.

This is, I think you will agree, pretty cool!

Amazon sells out of both Kindles days after launch
Quite a feat!
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Odyssey not commercial, says Makinson
Yes with a but!
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Amazon claims to have 70-80% of e-book market
Which in many ways demonstrates that the market is changing rapidly. Last year it would surely have been 90-95%.
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Want to choose your own adventure? There’s a books app for that
This is a nice development
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E-books to account for 10% of RH US sales, says Dohle
That’s a huge figure!
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The Checklist Manifesto
Nice note this from Raven Books
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Sunday Tribune Paperbacks Tom Widger
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Review: A Mobile Fortune: The Life and Times of Denis O’Brien by Siobhan Creaton
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Review: Dancing Prest by Aidan O’Connor
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Review: The Passage by Justin Cronin
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Review: Broken by Karin Slaughter
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Review: Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex bu Eoin Colfer
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Ten years of publishing worth its Salt
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Summer Fun at Scariff Library
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Dún Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures
They’ve used the cover for one of the first books I published!
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Sixties Fishing Guides
These are excellent
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Book launch: Executed for Ireland
Executed for Ireland: The Patrick Moran Story by May Moran was recently launched in King House, Boyle, Co Roscommon and in Kilmainham Jail.
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DLR LIBRARY BLOG
Two reviews from DLR Libraries today!
MAGIC UNIVERSE BY NIGEL CALDER.
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THE SLAP BY CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS
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This article titled “Penguin boss has no problem with ebooks” was written by David Teather, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 29th July 2010 20.59 UTC

Penguin this week celebrates its 75th year and is marking the anniversary by repackaging a series of seminal books from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although the company might afford itself a brief look backwards, it feels as though there is little room for nostalgia in book publishing now, as the industry turns its face firmly – and apprehensively – to the future.

Amazon last week announced sales of ebooks on its US site had outnumbered hardbacks for the first time, stunning casual observers, even if it had not been entirely unexpected in the trade.

The launch of the iPad has added a sense of urgency. Where music went first, books are set to follow, although Penguin and other publishers would hope without the same devastating effects. Amazon this week launched a cheaper, more lightweight version of its Kindle ebook reader and a digital store on its UK site, while others, including Google, are muscling in. Digital book sales are still less than 1% of Penguin, but the direction of the market is clear. In the US, digital books already account for 6% of consumer sales.

Penguin chief executive John Makinson says he is a convert. The day after we meet he is on his way to India, as part of David Cameron’s delegation, and had loaded titles on to his iPad, including a manuscript by John le Carré and some Portuguese classics (in English) ahead of Penguin launching a range in Brazil. He is also reading Lord Mandelson’s diary. It simply makes sense, he says, instead of carting an armful of books in your carry-on luggage.

Innovation

“It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us,” he says. “Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there are worries around pricing and around piracy, royalty rates and so on, but there is also this huge opportunity to do more as publishers.”

Publishing, he says, must embrace innovation: “I am keen on the idea that every book that we put on to an iPad has an author interview, a video interview, at the beginning. I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. There has to be a culture of experimentation, which doesn’t come naturally to book publishers. We publish a lot of historians, for example. They love the idea of using documentary footage to illustrate whatever it is they’re writing about.”

The very definition of a book is up for grabs he says, although the company has just published a version of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth for the iPad in the US that might provide clues – and horrify traditionalists. It includes scenes from a TV adaptation embedded in the text, as well as extras including the show’s music soundtrack and Follett’s video diary during the making of the series.

For now, Makinson says, digital books are expanding the market; hardback sales in the US are up this year, despite the march of ebooks. Piracy is not yet a significant issue and lessons have been learned from the music business.

“You have to give the consumer what the consumer wants – you can’t tell the consumer to go away. So we didn’t participate in this experiment where a number of publishers deferred publication of the ebook until a certain number of months after the hardcover publication. I thought that was a very bad idea. If the consumer wants to buy a book in an electronic format now, you should let the consumer have it.”

He has added confidence, because with tablets such as the iPad, consumers are used to paying a subscription to the wireless operator and for “apps”, creating a more benign environment than the wild west of the PC, where users are used to getting everything for free.

Penguin’s profits more than doubled to £44m in the first half of the year. The company gained market share, but one reason for the dramatic improvement was the outsourcing of some design and production to India last year; the company now has around 100 designers in Delhi making books for Dorling Kindersley, belying the idea that Britain can at least live off its creative industries. Makinson defends the decision and says DK is now back in profit, which means it can reinvest in Britain: “We can’t pretend we can do everything here. In order to be internationally competitive, some work needs to be done in other places.”

About 8% of the publisher’s sales are from its classics, including Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and revenues are still growing, despite much of the copyright being in the public domain. It is launching the range in Mandarin, Korean and Portuguese. But it is not all highbrow. What would Penguin’s founder, Sir Allen Lane, whose aim was to publish quality paperbacks for the masses, have made of Penguin putting out books “by” Peter Andre or Ant & Dec?

“Allen Lane’s view was that we should publish good writing of all kinds for all audiences at affordable prices,” Makinson says. “I’m not saying he would necessarily have approved every single publishing decision we take, but would he have approved of Penguin being a very democratic publishing company, publishing for lots of different tastes? I think he would definitely have approved.”

Makinson has long been mentioned as a successor to Dame Marjorie Scardino, who runs Pearson, Penguin’s parent company. Her departure has been a perennial question, though she has defied the investment community’s chattering classes by staying in her post for well over a decade. She has also confounded expectations by keeping Penguin and the Financial Times in a group dominated by educational publishing. Makinson says it now makes more sense than ever for Penguin to remain part of the group, as the digital era draws each division closer.

He says there will still be the need for publishers in the digital world: “I used to have this discussion with [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author] Douglas Adams. He created this thing called the digital village, an online publishing platform. Douglas’s argument was, ‘all of my friends will come along and publish on digital village and you the publishers will be disintermediated, you will be irrelevant’. Well, it hasn’t happened. I am not aware of any successful direct to consumer publishing model that exists.

“The reason it doesn’t work is that the publishers do actually perform quite a useful service: they edit the book, then they publicise it.” In the physical world, they make sure it is stocked in bookshops, he adds.

Clubbable

Makinson, 55, perhaps feels more adaptable than some of his counterparts because he arrived at Penguin as an outsider. A clubbable character, he has taken an unusual career path, from a journalist on the Financial Times, to working for the Saatchis, setting up his own investment consultancy, running the Financial Times and then becoming Pearson finance director, despite having no training as an accountant.

But his passion for books is evident. Five years ago, he and his brother bought a bookshop in the small Norfolk town of Holt. For an out-of-the-way independent, the Holt Bookshop attracts a starry line-up of authors for events, including Stephen Fry, due to talk about his new autobiography, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is published by Penguin.

“We are all terribly sentimental about books,” Makinson insists. “It is terribly important to me that we sell lots of wonderful books in my little independent in Norfolk, and when I talk about digital I do sometimes worry that it looks as though I am neglecting all this,” he points to the books on the shelves behind him, “which I am not.”

CV

Born: 1954, Derby.

Education: Graduated from Cambridge with honours in English and History.

Career: 1976-1979, journalist, Reuters; 1979-1986, journalist, Financial Times; 1986-1989, vice-chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi; 1989-1994, co-founder of capital markets advisory firm Makinson Cowell; 1994-1996, managing director, Financial Times; 1996-2002, finance director, Pearson; 2002-present, chairman and chief executive Penguin Books.

Other interests: chairman of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a director of the National Theatre and of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organisation.

Family: Married with two daughters.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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This article titled “Stieg Larsson becomes first author to sell 1m ebooks on Amazon” was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 28th July 2010 13.27 UTC

The late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson has beaten Stephenie Meyer and James Patterson to become the first author to sell more than one million ebooks on Amazon.

The online retailer said yesterday that Larsson, author of the Millennium trilogy, had become the first member of its new “Kindle Million Club”, for authors whose work has sold over a million copies in Amazon’s Kindle store in the US. The crime novelist is likely to be joined by thriller writer Patterson – Amazon said last week that it had sold over 860,000 of his ebooks – while Twilight scribe Meyer, Sookie Stackhouse creator Charlaine Harris and queen of romantic suspense Nora Roberts have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books in the US.

“Larsson’s books have captivated millions of readers around the world and ignited a voracious interest in the lives of its main characters Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blomqvist,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle content. “It’s been exciting to have been a part of introducing so many people to these great books.”

The novelist’s three books – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – currently top Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list, and are also in the top 10 bestselling Kindle books of all time, according to the retailer.

The books have also topped Amazon’s UK Kindle chart for “a good few months”, said Iain Millar, marketing manager at Larsson’s UK publisher Quercus, and are currently at the top of Waterstone’s ebook bestseller list.

But Millar said that UK ebook sales for Larsson were “nowhere near the million mark, which is indicative of the extent to which the US ebook market is ahead of ours”.

“Broadly, the print books are equally popular in the States and in the UK, but uptake of the electronic version is much higher there, primarily because a much higher proportion of book customers in the States own ebook devices,” he said.

Quercus has sold 3.3m copies of Larsson’s books in the UK, and estimates that worldwide sales of the three novels are somewhere between 35-40m copies, “but they are literally selling too fast to count”, said Millar.

The news about Larsson’s ebook sales follows Amazon’s announcement last week that over the past three months it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardback books. Kindle sales accelerated in the past month alone, when the online retailer said it sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardbacks. The figures cover Amazon’s US book business, include hardback sales when there is no Kindle edition and exclude free Kindle books.

The retailer made no mention of the proportion of paperback salesto Kindle sales, but founder Jeff Bezos stressed that ebooks were not cannibalising print, saying that hardback purchases at Amazon were still growing and that Kindles had overtaken them regardless.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Just in time for the arrival of Apple’s iPad Northern Ireland’s Jamie Guiney from Co. Armagh, has just signed with Ether Books Ltd whose App makes short stories available on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touches worldwide.

Jamie is now in the company of an impressive list of authors whose stories are also available in the app, such as booker prize winner Hilary Mantel, Lionel Shriver, Alexander McCall Smith, Louis De Bernieres and even Sir Paul McCartney.

Sophia Bartleet MD of Ether Books said, ‘We are delighted to be publishing Jamie Guiney’s stories. They have a very strong sense of place so that when you are reading them you can almost smell and taste a different world. Ether Books is always on the lookout for the best new authors to publish on to people’s iPhones and iPads alongside their list of prize winning contemporary writers.’

This week Amazon announced that, for the first time ever on Amazon.com, ebooks had outsold hardbacks, proving that whilst some of us are reluctant to part with our beloved bound volumes, there is an ever increasing number embracing the concept of electronic reading.

And with Apple‘s much heralded iPad finally launching on these shores, we decided to take a look at some of the various apps available for reading books on your iPads, iPods and iPhones, and determine which, if any, are worth their salt.

Kindle has one of the most appealing interfaces- they’ve recognised that swiping seems to be the most intuitive way of turning a page, a feature which some developers have criminally failed to include.

As far as features go, it sticks to the basics, with the ability to bookmark pages, search text, and change the font size and colour. As a basic eReader, Kindle does the trick nicely without many frills attached.

Furthermore, the iFlow range is rather limited, covering primarily classics, and educational texts (philosophy, psychology, etc.). What the iFlow reader does have in its corner, however, is its unique interface.

Utilising the accelerometer, the app scrolls the text along the screen, with the degree of tilting determining the speed of the scrolling. For ease of reading, this this method is by far the most natural. I’ve already gotten through two novels…

Don’t like the line spacing? You can change it. Margins irritating you? No Problem. The somewhat frustrating problem of automatic page rotation is dealt with (why Apple never considered that someone would look at their iPhone while lying down is beyond me), with the ability to lock the page in landscape or portrait mode.
Social networking fans can immediately share what they’re reading through facebook or twitter via a menu of shortcuts which, of course, you can customise.

Arguably its most convenient addition is the concept of assignable hot-keys. The user can designate an action to a particular touch or movement- for example, using the classic pinch and spread motion to adjust font size.

With a wide selection enabling downloads from a variety of eBook retailers, Lexcycle seem to have covered all the bases, providing one of the best eReading apps available. (Lexcycle was acquired by Amazon in 2009)

The experience of Kobo holds up well beyond the opening screen, with a number of ways of going from page to page. This seems to be its main area of customisation, with the other options being quite basic (font size, brightness, etc.).

In offering extra page turning options it pushes itself ahead of basic reading apps, but some of these choices are impractical to the degree that they become useless (manual scrolling??). As far as selection is concerned, Kobo fares very well, and once you’ve created a Kobo account you can purchase and download titles directly through the app itself.

Comics, quite simply, are amazing to read on an iPad. The screen lends itself fabulously to the images, and the technology offers a number of interesting ways to get through the story. For example, this app offers animated transitions, where the panels are displayed one by one, offering a dynamic reading experience well suited to the subject matter.

The app also capitalises on the periodical nature of comic books, offering an update service similar to podcast management, where new issues of subscribed series are automatically downloaded and added to your library. As far as the iPad is concerned, this is one area where the full potential of the medium is explored, and to great effect.

App: ibooks | Developer: Apple | Rating: 4/5
Apple’s own reading app is cosmetically appealing, offering a bookshelf interface similar to Kobo, but endeavors to offer a customisation level similar to Stanza. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite manage to win out in either category, but provides a solid app with several interesting features nonetheless.

Its actual reading interface is one of the most appealing available, particularly when viewed on the iPad, and provides one of the most generally pleasurable reading experiences. Among its attempts at offering functions beyond the basics, iBooks offers a dictionary, accesible through double tapping a word.

While convenient, the strength of this app lies in its style, and its selection, which offers tens of thousands of titles through Apple’s iBookstore (though the selection for Ireland is currently only Public Domain works, this should change soon).