DEA Mediagroup News

On Monday, Amazon unveiled its second-generation Kindle e-reader. On Tuesday, HarperCollins announced it was “entering a consultation period” that could well see 5% of its workforce in the UK axed, while it was shutting Collins in the US. Of course, there is no direct link between these two events, but it seems hard to see a near-term future in which the e-reader creates more publishing jobs than it destroys. Certainly, in her announcement to staff Harper chief Victoria Barnsley alluded to the “constant technological and market changes that mean we need to take a good hard look at the way we work”, and it’s impossible not to see e-readers as part of those, but she also pointed the finger firmly at the increasingly apocalyptic economic climate. “The recession is acting as a catalyst for changes we would inevitably have had to make.” The second-generation Kindle, plus the Sony Reader and a clutch of other lower-profile readers, hold the ¬possibility of being a further agent of change, beyond the rising costs and shrinking margins publishers are ¬currently being squeezed by. The first Kindle never made it across the pond but we now know that Amazon will bring its faster, cheaper, slimmer, better successor here soon. It has 230,000 e-books on sale now in the US and British publishers have tens of thousands of e-books ready to roll—albeit not in Amazon.com’s proprietory format. There is a three-way tussle underway between Sony, whose e-reader is already on sale here, Amazon and Google, which has 1.5 million books scanned and now available through the iPhone. Strategically, publishers would prefer anyone but Amazon to win out, because an Amazon victory would fatally tilt the eternal power-struggle between retailer and publisher. But what scares publishers even more is the possi¬bility that the Kindle will prove to be the iPod for the book, if not now then soon. Since 2001, sales of physical music products have almost halved in unit terms, with employment in record companies following a similar downward trajectory. Illegal downloading was the real ¬killer, sucking revenue out of music publishing, and although ¬ e-books bristle with anti-hacker counter-measures, the suspicion remains that once e-readers become more common so too will pirated e-books. So every reading device sold could represent a book-buyer lost for good. *Neill Denny (editor-in-chief of The Bookseller) The Bookseller -13 February 2009*

Io, gli altri. Tema dell’edizione 2009
Dopo i Confini (2007) e la Bellezza (2008), leitmotiv dell’edizione 2009 sarà l’Io, e il suo rapporto con gli altri. Un tema da interpretare secondo i punti di vista della letteratura, della psicanalisi, delle scienze, del mito, della politica… come ogni anno alcuni tra i massimi esponenti del pensiero contemporaneo ne parleranno al Lingotto tra il 14 e il 18 maggio per l’edizione 2009 della Fiera Internazionale del Libro di Torino.

Anche quest’anno la DEA sarà presente alla fiera Più Libri Più Liberi. A tutti coloro che passeranno a trovarci al ns. stand N07, verrà regalato un buono per l’acquisto di qualsiasi prodotto (libri, musica, film, videogiochi) sul sito http://www.deastore.com CON LO SCONTO DEL 15%. Inoltre, tra gli eventi organizzati durante la manifestazione, si terrà una TAVOLA ROTONDA:

Librerie on line come opportunità per la piccola editoria
Sabato 6 dicembre, ore 14.00 – 15.15, Sala Smeraldo

Vi aspettiamo!