For the third year in a row Jeremy Greenfield has taken time in December to speak with about a dozen ebook and digital publishing influencers about the year that was and their predictions of what might happen in the ebook and digital publishing industry in 2014.

After these conversations he put all the predictions together in a big list and then chose the ten best ones to flesh out and share with readers: Ten Bold Predictions for Ebooks and Digital Publishing in 2014, this year led by the prediction that Barnes & Noble will close or sell its Nook business. As per usual with My Greenfield the piece is well researched and intuitive. It is certainly worth a read.

Digital Book World’s Conference and Expo starts today in New York City. Innovative book entrepreneur and the founder of Sourcebooks, Dominique Raccah is a featured speaker. She is fascinated by the transformation of the book and wonders whether digital books might well be changing everything. Her speech titled Rethinking Failure: Finding the opportunities in our challenges is bound to be interesting.

The agenda of the different sessions is an education in itself. One entitled Data-driven decision making: Publishing Smarter will look at what in-house, industry, or supply-chain data you can capture – and how you should use it. A panel of CIOs and CDOs from McGraw-Hill, Perseus Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Science and Education and F+W Media will focus on the data and the methods needed today.

Book Industry Study Group’s Making Information Pay for Higher Education offers new insights into the unfolding digital transformation in higher education publishing. It is packed with value for senior managers in publishing technology and operations, marketing, strategy, and content development; retailers; and those involved in content delivery whether print or digital.

There is also the Digital Design & eBook Production Conference happening today, it is a nuts-and-bolts sessions focused on production, workflow, design, EPUB3, typography and the future of eBook production.

Launch Kids features top executives and innovators discussing the future of the children’s book publishing business. Focused on both traditional print publishers moving into the digital space and digital players partnering with established publishers, the conference highlights new digital products, platforms, and channels.

As for the Expo, you can meet a curated group of publishing services suppliers and find partners who can support your transition to new systems for content management, digital workflow, ebook design & production and audience development in the exhibit hall.

Wouldn’t I love to be in New York right now.

Visit www.digitalbookworld.com for more information

The first week of September was once again marked with a flurry of reading promotion activities across South Africa. National Book Week was launched in Port Elizabeth on Monday, 2 September 2013. The launch was attended by some of the leading voices in the South African literary landscape.

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In your physical bookshop, customers will enter, move around and finally exit the premises in a manner that is largely dictated by your floor plan and accepted laws of physics. It would give you quite a shock if, one day, you were to witness a customer suddenly blinking into existence next to the gardening bookshelf at the back of your shop. Imagine if you tried to approach this ghostly shopper, only for her to simply vanish into thin air, then instantly reappear in a different part of the shop, before finally disappearing altogether, never to be seen or heard of again. You would probably be seriously questioning your grip on reality. This unlikely-sounding scenario happens all the time in the online version of your shop.

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Perhaps we should look to one of our BRICS partner-countries, Brazil, to get a glimpse of what the future of Educational bookselling in South Africa could hold in store. Nuvem de Livros, a subscription based digital library that started in September 2011, has recently boasted that they have 1 million users in Brazil and Argentina, making them the single largest e-book subscription service in the world, short only of the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library. The reason for their success? Students, according to Nate Hoffeider at Thedigitalreader.com. Nuvem de Livros was launched to offer students access to content that Brazil’s limited school libraries couldn’t provide. The goals were ambitious to start with – Terra Brasil reports that this platform has a goal of supporting the 15 million Brazilian students who only have a limited access to a library, as well as the 3 million college students taking distance-learning courses.

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