An interesting and sensible move this:
Bloomsbury has purchased the backlist of The National Archives Publishing programme, and entered into an agreement to co-publish a range of forthcoming titles.
The National Archives of the United Kingdom, in Kew, holds more than 1,000 years of government files from Foreign and Home Office records to colonial and military documents, with more than 80 million digitised records.
via Bloomsbury acquires National Archives backlist | The Bookseller.
Excellent post, as per usual, from Martyn Daniels on the future of the book. Three nice observations:
The second observation is that digital is different. Many in publishing see it as merely replace the physical jacket with a digital one. Same text, same blurb same stuff. Some want to enrich it by adding more media and make it in effect ‘fatter’, but remains the same story, same stuff.
The challenge is to recognise that digital offers not just more media opportunities but a fundamental change in the amount of content produced, accessible and how it is read. Why do we still continue to produce 300 pages or the print economic model? Why does the work have to be complete? After all the serial story is not that far away? Why do we combine digital and print rights and surely its like combining film and print rights – sometimes relivant but far more the case not.
via Brave New World: Rethinking the Future: The Digital Divide.
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