HarperCollins Keen On Digital And Mobile

The publishing world is increasingly going digital, and since a lot of reading is done while “mobile”, it makes sense that mobiles are a part of that play. HarperCollins launched an iPhone service a few months ago with excerpts of certain books — the idea being that people would read the excerpts to see if they like the book, and if so buy it. HarperCollins CEO Victoria Barnsley is quite keen on digital media. “The thing I would want to stress most is from an author’s point of view, digital is a fantastic opportunity. An author through the medium of the web can have a direct dialogue with the readers. Some authors are quite frightened and threatened by it. But as one author said, obscurity is a greater threat than privacy. The web means authors need no longer be obscure,” she is quoted in The Independent. HarperCollins is launching a website, Authonomy.co.uk, which it hopes will be a community of authors and readers, based on Barnsley’s view that more people want to write a book than read a book (which is possibly true, but I guess it’s a good thing that people can read more books than other people can write). There’s no details there on any mobile part to the community, but I suspect there will be since that is where all communities are going.

Barnsley doesn’t think andy of the “e-readers” that have come on to the market so far are “quite there yet”, and it’s worth pointing out that on Monday Amazon will launch Kindle, a portable e-reader with the dimensions of a paperback.

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