Bloomsbury

Little, Brown Book Group and Little, Brown and Company are delighted to announce that they will publish J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults worldwide in the English language, both in print and ebooks.

Electronic time moves faster than real time. Just three years ago, the book world was having a collective nervous breakdown about "the future of the book". But now those fears are fading. Christmas 2011 was the all-time ebook holiday. Amazon reports worldwide sales of more than a million Kindles a week, with record demand led by its Kindle Fire tablet.

Even as more readers switch to the convenience of e-books, publishers are giving old-fashioned print books a makeover. Publishers are putting more thought into books' aesthetics. Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading. When people do beautiful books, theyre noticed more, said Robert S. Miller, the publisher of Workman Publishing. Its like

Keynote speakers for the event are Bill Trippe, vice president and lead analyst from The Gilbane Group, a division of Outsell, Inc. and Evan Schnittman, managing director, group sales and marketing, print and digital at Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. They will focus on how e-books have generated renewed interest in content management.

The Perseus Books Group has created a distribution and marketing service that will allow authors to self-publish their own e-books, the company said on Sunday. The new service will give authors an alternative to other self-publishing services and a favorable revenue split that is unusual in the industry: 70 percent to the author and 30 percent to the distributor. Traditional publishers normally provide authors a royalty of about 25 percent for e-books.

Bloomsbury Publishing, home to the Harry Potter books in Britain, launched its first purely digital imprint on Wednesday which it said would bring out-of-print titles "back from the dead." Bloomsbury Reader has signed up a string of authors including Monica Dickens, great grand-daughter of Charles, politicians Alan Clark and Ted Heath, crime writer H.R.F. Keating and novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett. The publisher is focusing on books which are out of print and where all English-language rights have reverted back to the author or the author's estate.

After a suspenseful buildup, J. K. Rowling has announced that Pottermore.com  will be an e-bookstore, exclusively selling Harry Potter e-books and digital audiobooks. Pottermore could shake up digital publishing as much as the Harry Potter books first shook up print publishing over a decade ago. Here’s how.

Amazon's rollout of a deep-discount pricing program for 600 books last week already is putting downward pressure on eBook pricing. The “Sunshine Deals” offer sells electronic books at price points of 99 cents, $1.99 and $2.99.

This week is the London Book Fair, one of the world's largest trade shows for the publishing industry.

Enhanced e-books are dead, discoverability is the most important issue facing e-book vendors, while pricing strategies should be measured against other digital content, not physical books.