The recent announcement that eBooks now outsell printed volumes has been interpreted as a pessimistic outlook for the publishing industry¹. But rather than a “death knell”, this is a signal that consumers are ringing in changes to which publishers must rapidly respond; to accept the significant role eBooks play within their offering. Yesterday, Bloomsbury chief […]
A question such as “Would the proposed HS2 rail project represent the best use of government budget?” soon attracts a range of qualitative opinions. Analytical data modelling offers clearer answers around the quantitative results that can be expected and the extent to which problems are solved and created. Further, comprehensively answering the question requires more […]
We are pleased to present a new Case Study to sum up a successful Business Intelligence project we delivered for Addison Lee. Through consultancy and implementation of BOXI 3.1 software, Addison Lee have an efficient reporting infrastructure and leave behind the many drawbacks of manual reporting: Largely the time and resources required to generate reports, […]
The future wasn’t meant to look like this. According to e-book evangelists, freeing the book from its paper format was going to herald a new era of reading. Physical book sales would wither and e-book sales soar as a new generation of reader, converted by the convenience of digital reading, thumbed through Twilight on their […]
Another week, another publishing takeover. Yesterday McGraw Hill announced that it was offloading its education publishing business, though this time not to another publisher. The Private equity arm of investment firm Apollo Global Management will take control of the textbook publisher, which has undershot its revenue targets in 7 of the last 8 quarters and […]
A few months ago I was invited to speak on BBC Radio 4’s flagship consumer affairs show, You and Yours, alongside Professor Nigel Shadbolt, to discuss the government’s Midata scheme proposals The initiative is gaining significant momentum as consumer affairs minister, Jo Swinson, waded in on the debate by threatening to take legal action against […]
Pew Research Center has just released a new research study – Younger Americans’ Reading and Library Habits. It provides a fascinating look at the behaviours of young adults and their attitudes towards reading and libraries. On the face of it, this research may seem to be of little relevance to the UK publishing market, but […]
How Random House and Penguin should handle the imminent amalgamation of their IT systems. In a deal announced earlier this week, Pearson and Bertelsmann are set to own around 25% of the global publishing market when the publishers Penguin and Random House merge in the latter half of 2013. Random House owner Bertelsmann will own […]
It’s been a torrid year for RBS. A few months ago we blogged about its catastrophic IT outage, which threw the spotlight on to how many banks are reliant on antiquated IT systems. And earlier this week this issue edged back into the limelight with the announcement that Santander was stepping away from a deal […]
Last week, Amazon announced that it was extending its controversial e-book lending scheme Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to the UK. In its current state, Kindle Lending Library is a value added service to Amazon Prime, the premium delivery service for which the e-commerce giant charges £49 a year here in the UK. It allows users […]