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Here’s a thing someone floated at me. What if Amazon released a Kindle-reading app for the iPhone?

It’s a thought, isn’t it?

After initial doubts – why would Amazon deliberately waste all that investment in the Kindle hardware? – I did come to the conclusion that the Kindle and iPhone demographics, while they certainly overlap, are by no means mutually inclusive. I don’t have figures on this, but my presumption is that the iPhone’s younger and/or early-adopter audience is not quite the same as the Kindle’s slightly older, less techy, but more hardcore booky audience (heavy genre readers, in romance…

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A couple of months ago I was doing some research into various sources of book data, and one of the things I was interested in was seeing if it was possible to hook into local library data. For example, if I was building a site that contained lots of book info, it’s easy to point to a place to buy that book online, and there are increasing ways to find things if they’re in your local bookshop (e.g. localbookshops.co.uk and LT Local). But what about seeing if it’s in your local library?

If I want to check…

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It’s Remembrance Day today, 90 years since the end of the First World War, 63 since the Second, and all the others too, and it’s always been resonant in my family. On my mother’s side, there were lots of boys in the family: uncles, brothers and sons, who didn’t come back, and on my father’s side a smaller family but no less a part played.

Last year, my father gave me my Grandpa’s archive, comprising his photograph collection, some ephemera, and his memoirs, which he dictated to my Grandma, who dutifully typed them up, in the late 1980s….

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I’m very pleased to announce that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a collaboration between my employer Apt and The Institute for the Future of the Book, is now live.

Several months ago we heard that the Institute was setting up in the UK, and we approached Chris Meade with a view to working with if:book London on a joint project. The result of this was the realisation of a long-cherished idea from Bob Stein, the founder of the Institute. Bob had recently reread Doris Lessing’s classic novel The Golden Notebook, and wanted to bring it…

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Over at Times Emit, I’ve just posted my notes from last night’s talk by Vicky Barnsley at LSE, where she talked about the changing publishing landscape, and some of the things HarperCollins is doing to expand the role of the publihser in the 21st Centure. It was a good talk, with a number of interesting points made and a couple of announcements. Go read it.