iBooks or Apps? The publisher's dilemma
Should publishers sell books using Apple’s App Store or iBookstore?
Many publishers have started using the iPhone App Store as a channel to sell book content by packaging e-books as applications. There are currently 18,000 books in the App Store, and books are the fastest growing category of application in the store.
With the launch of the iPad and the iBookstore, Apple has given publishers another option for delivering content. In this post we analyse the pros and cons of both approaches. Continue reading
In an article in the London Review of Books in 1995 John Sutherland wrote: ‘Momentous changes in copyright law, such as those of 1710, 1842, 1890 and 1911, are preceded by periods of turmoil and radical uncertainty about the rights and wrongs of intellectual property. We are in such a period now.’
Sutherland could hardly have foreseen how much more uncertain things were about to become. The particular issue exercising him at the time, harmonisation of UK law with the latest EU regulations on copyright, surely pales into insignificance compared to subsequent events. The threat from internet piracy, the emergence of Amazon as a dominant player in book supply and the Google Books settlement: all of these were seismic developments, the cumulative effects of which has been to transform the landscape of publishing utterly. 
This is the third and last of a series of blog posts (see