In the flurry of e-book and print books sales stats, we know for certain that the children’s market does not conform to the wider market’s results. Still a predominantly print-based market it is the only one of the four major BookScan categories to have year-on-year growth. Yet digital is having ...read more →
Author Archive
Tête à tête with Faber’s Stephen Page
Having scaled the walls of Faber’s well-manicured garden eleven years ago, Faber chief executive Stephen Page found himself in the broadcast hot-seat, sandwiched between Naked Bookers Philip Jones and Sam Missingham. This show is the first in an occasional series of tête à têtes, devoted to the illuminati of the ...read more →
There’s A Hole In My Sock Puppet
Sock puppets of the world look on. This week The Naked Book interviewed puppet hunter extraordinaire the thriller writer Jeremy Duns. Duns exposed crime-writer R J Ellory last week, and he has been seeking the truth about Stephen Leather’s anonymous accounts and activities since Harrogate. But who is he? And ...read more →
In The Land Of The E, The Glassy-Eyed Are King
Imagine if you will the final moments of Bugsy Malone, as reinvented for radio. That was this week’s Naked Book with authors Ewan Morrison and Barry Eisler slinging pies across Skype, as they sought to articulate a future for authors with or without publishers. Attempting to bat them out of ...read more →
The E-Book In The Library
It’s the debate that is well overdue. The issue over how libraries should loan e- books is generating noise all over. The discussion has laid bare the real allegiances across the trade, as it impacts on all parts—-booksellers, publishers, authors, and of course librarians. Consensus has broken down, with some ...read more →
The Great Amazon Debate
In 1994, Jeffrey Preston Bezos left his Wall Street job to found an internet based company in his garage. The ‘bookseller’ known as Amazon sold its first book one year later. Amazon may have marketed itself as “the world’s largest bookstore”, but its logo–an arrow leading from A to Z–was ...read more →
The Broadcast Takeover
Television is an increasingly important area for writers and the publishing industry generally. As the book market becomes ever more competitive, the writer’s platform has to grow in as many ways as possible… and one of the biggest platforms out there is TV. That’s why tonight’s show is so important. ...read more →
Face The Bafflement And Do It Anyway
Six months into 2012 and the publishing world is a confused and scary place. Pottermore has just about disintermediated all of us, while the Seattle wildebeest has everyone from James Daunt to James Bond in its thrall. Agents from the Justice League have publishing executives under surveillance, while Mssrs Barnes ...read more →
Hang On A Minute That’s My Work You Are Talking About
It was the clash of the old and new on The Naked Book, with Richard Mollet, chief executive of the Publishers Association, having a proper playground scrap with two “new media” folk over copyright. Mollet has recently turned on ‘copyright eroders’, such as The Pirate Party and the Open Rights ...read more →
Something Innovative This Way Comes
It was start-up night on The Naked Book with three of the hottest new innovators explaining how their bookish brews will charm the money, entice the publisher, and beguile the reader. Oh, and make a billion. Representing Small Demons was Richard Nash: officially charged with saving the “book biz”, Nash ...read more →
The Porn Supremacy
In the week that Microsoft bought a fifth of Barnes & Noble’s digital businesses, and we learned that e-books sales grew 360% in the UK last year, we thought at The Naked Book we’d ignore all that – and focus on ‘mummy porn’. Why? Well, it was the public wot ...read more →
Shiny, Happy, Publishing People
As the great circus of publishing delights that is the annual London Book Fair disappears from view for another year, this week’s The Naked Book finally found out what it was all about. Just Be Positive. And Happy, of course. It might seem difficult: the Department of Justice has banned ...read more →
Bringing Up Baby
Launching a virtual world, ahem, ‘experience’, it’s easy street. Just ask Pottermore’s Charlie Redmayne who revealed exclusively on The Naked Book that his site had shifted £1m worth of Harry Potter e-books after three days. But don’t be fooled. As Anna ‘not virtual’ Rafferty, m.d. of Penguin Digital, explained – ...read more →
Digital Rights Moratorium (or How We Learned To Mom-Proof E-Books)
It will become known as the night the moms finally killed off Digital Rights Management. Or how publishers learned to feel the fear but did it anyway. The first ever broadcast of The Naked Book heard from two big names in the e-book business explaining why that bit of code ...read more →
