Our weekly news roundup from Dan Holloway includes updates about the future of ebooks, Digital Rights Management, Geoblocking, the launch of Inara (a new ebook platform whose business model is driven by in-book adverts), Indies and Libraries, Amazon updates in Poland, and the demise of America Star Books.
Libraries are magical places. I am absurdly lucky in Oxford to spend a great deal of time in some of the most remarkable reading rooms in the world, from the eccentric rotunda of the Radcliffe Camera to thousands of the world’s earliest printed texts in Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room. Libraries are doorways for the mind, […]
Oxford is a strange place to be in the summer. It’s a pretty small city, and for much of the year a significant part of its population is made up of the students from its two universities. When the students leave, far from dropping the numbers swell even further thanks to tourists drawn by the pull […]
One of the most popular genres on YouTube these days features “unboxing” videos. That is, literally, videos of people taking a thing out of the box in which it arrived. I was reminded of this by one of the articles that has been doing the rounds this week, linking the resurgence of print books and […]
With apologies, I turn once for inspiration again this week to the world of endurance running (don’t worry, next week I enter the powerlifting stage of my training season!). I apologise also for any delirium, brought to you by industrial quantities of painkillers after running 100 kilometres in 19 hours. While I was running my own […]
This week’s must-read round-up of self-publishing news for indie authors includes news on key distributors, aggregators and bookstores – brought to you by ALLi’s news editor Dan Holloway.
It’s been a tough week for anyone even remotely my age, certainly anyone who grew up in the UK with any connection to the storytelling arts, with three deaths in a single week. The film lover in me will always be grateful to the sardonic style of Barry Norman. And if there is any warm-heartedness […]
This past weekend saw the staging of one of the most iconic events in endurance sport, the Western States 100 mile race. Like thousands of others I was glued to twitter as history appeared to be in the making for more than 70 miles, with ultrarunning phenomenon Jim Walmsley looking to chop 3/4 of an […]
It’s less than a month until what will be my third 100 kilometre ultramarathon. I have had a terrible year for training, drifting from injury to virus and back again. Of late, my injuries have been so many I have taken to doing my actual aerobic training on a rowing machine, pretty much resting my […]
One of the things I love so much about being an indie is the tendency to end up in places you never imagined seeing yourself – whether that’s literally or metaphorically. Because as an indie, you have a certain openness to saying yes to opportunities and seeing where they lead. This week found me led […]