'2011 London Book Fair' by Andrew Whittaker

The growth of digital

There was a certain end-of-term informality about the final day of the 2011 London Book Fair (LBF) on Wednesday. After 72 hours of meetings, greetings and tweetings, the exhibitors drew breath and by and large seemed to call it a success (and a welcome tonic to last year’s ash cloud disappointments).

I spent the day meeting with the aggregators that help Thorogood sell their books in digital format around the world. In common, they talked about how rapidly the ebooks market is evolving; both in terms of buying habits and in the processes used for converting books to digital format.

We’ve been selling PDF files of Thorogood titles for some time. And now we’re adding epub format files to the catalogue – so that Thorogood books can be read on ebook reading devices like the Kindle and its competing cousins. For us, and for the rest of the publishing world, the next big leap forward lies in adapting more visually-led books for the digital world. Art books, graphic novels and titles like our own Speak the Culture series are much harder to marry with the demands of digital.

However, there were firms at LBF promoting new software that purported to do the job. So, envisage a book displayed rather like a glorified app – one that can bolster content with video clips, audio and links, and which can display rich artwork and photographs within the flow of the text. Sounds impressive – and the samples I saw were very promising indeed. It remains to be seen whether the book buying public will accept the reduction of their weighty, elegant design-led books down to an electronic image in quite the same way that they seem to be doing with text.

Andrew Whittaker

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