Our popular series on the works of great thinkers is now available to buy. Take the challenge and enter into another thought-world

One of the most worthwhile things we have done in the belief section of this site is to run the How to Believe series on books and authors worth knowing. Now 10 of the earlier ones have been republished as Kindle eBooks. They can all be bought from here. These include Giles Fraser on Wittgenstein, and Jane Williams on Genesis. There are some of the most popular: Peter Thompson on Marx and Clare Carlisle on Kierkegaard, and two really admirable ones on Donne and Milton, by Roz Kaveney and Jessica Martin. There is even an Orthodox Jewish take on the book of Job, by Alexander Goldberg, which was one of our happiest discoveries.

I have always commissioned for this series on the basis that if you get someone to talk about the work they love the results will be worthwhile. This means that some of the authors and books I'd most like to know about have not yet been covered while in at least one case I had to write the series myself. But it is a distinguishing mark of all these little books that they are written with real emotion. What is being said matters, even when it is not autobiographical. They are books for people who know what it is to argue with an author in the watches of the night, even when he's been dead for 300 years – and not just to argue, but to lose the argument.

This requires a special kind of attention. That is why the series is called "How to Believe". The challenge is to enter into the thought-world of the author: to move into the drama and not just watch from the sidelines. You could not have better guides than these.

• Ebooks

Andrew Brown
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The controversial columnist, who has moved inexorably over the years from left to right, has now launched her own publishing empire 'to make a better world'. Will readers, including her fans in the US, buy into her vision?

Once upon a time, she described herself as "the liberal who has been mugged by reality". Now she's rebranding herself as "Britain's political conscience" and, it just so happens, someone who would look and sound great on Fox News. Within several hours of the launch of her new online venture, Melanie Phillips had surely achieved her objective. The headline in the Wall Street Journal? "Britain's most high-profile columnist, broadcaster and author launches Melanie Phillips Electric Media: EM." So what is this new project? "Cultural icon creates direct access to network of loyal readers through new emBooks imprint."

Via the new branded website, fans and enemies alike can buy a Melanie Phillips T-shirt or mug: "Think the unthinkable. Say the unsayable. Do the undoable." Or pick your own slogan: "Keep in touch with Melanie Phillips by reading snips from her columns, broadcasts and blogs. Choose the one you like and we'll even print it on a T-shirt and deliver it to your door. Don't miss the unmissable." ("Snips"?)

This is an intriguing move for Phillips, 61, and many see it as shrewd. Authors have long been able to globalise their reach by using digital word of mouth: EL James owes most of her success to the internet and even JK Rowling has taken over the direct marketing of her own books on Potterworld. Why use a middle man when you can sell yourself? Until now, though, it has been difficult for journalists and political commentators to widen their audience beyond their native influence. Phillips is making a statement of international intent. Make way, then, for a sort of Piers Morgan of political thinking?

Or maybe emBooks is something more than that: a media hub or a new digital channel. There are ebook downloads from other authors on Decoding Your 21st Century Daughter: The Anxious Parent's Guide to Raising a Teenage Girl and Diana's Baby: Kate, William and the Repair of a Broken Family. The team behind the scenes comes with impressive credentials. One of Phillips's co-founders, Elliot Balaban, has been responsible for digital launches for Microsoft, Time Warner and IBM; another, Suzanne Balaban, is a former director of publicity for Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster.

The first port of call, though, is surely the attention of the American Republican-voting public (and/or of the constituency where Phillips sees herself: disillusioned liberals). At her London launch on Thursday, Phillips handed out goodie bags to a select group, including works and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith. Reports afterwards seemed torn between pumping up her controversial reputation and minimising her significance as a political force.

On the one hand, she's "the Daily Mail's in-house Tasmanian devil" and "a commentator filled with anger, venom and hatred"; on the other, she's simply "promoting herself and her outlook" and, most sniffily of all, "joining the world of epublishing". The branded merchandise comes in for the biggest flak. "For prices ranging from £12.80 to £24.20, you can buy a case for an iPhone, kindle or iPad, a baseball cap, a small umbrella or an Earth Positive tote bag," says the Independent. "But will anyone buy her branded mugs?" it adds.

The global-facing brand does not mention anything specific about political positioning and instead has a sort of Oprah feel. In the launch video for this new hub, Phillips describes how she had always had a wish to "make a better world". However, she figured it was always the journalist's business to stand back, at one remove. "But now because I have this new kind of platform and I can bring other people into the party, I can distil that wisdom for you. I can bottle it and put it on the net, put it out there. And you can all come and have a share of it." There is a desire to connect here, coupled with an evangelism: "And isn't that a wonderful thing to do? That we could all together help make that better world that I know we all want."

So what might this better world look like? Phillips is seen as one of the first commentators to understand the impact of 9/11: "I realised the west was facing something different from ordinary terrorism or war by one state on another. This was more akin to a cancer in the bloodstream. It had to be fought by all the weapons, both military and cultural at our disposal." She also wrote the memorable phrase: "Islam is the spectre at the woolly liberals' feast."

Her views on Israel can be especially trenchant. Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland was especially provoked by a column in which she wrote: "Individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, but their cause amounts to Holocaust-denial as a national project." He argued that it was imperative to counter the general impression she gave – especially to her wide US audience – "that Europe is back in the 1930s and that Britain now seethes with Jew-hatred."

A self-described "solitary, serious-minded only child", Phillips was raised by leftwing parents "on the impoverished streets of east London", though she was educated at the private Putney high school. Her father's parents had arrived from Poland in the early 20th century; her grandfather took the name Phillips because the immigration officer couldn't pronounce his surname.

Her background fuels her political stance, she suggests: "I had seen at first hand in my own undereducated family of Jewish immigrants that an inability to control the language meant an inability to control their own lives. My Polish grandmother had not been able to fill in an official form without help; and my father (although born in Britain) just didn't have the words to express complicated thoughts, and would always lose out against those who looked down at him from their educated citadels."

After reading English at Oxford, she became a trainee at the Evening Echo in Hemel Hempstead, winning the award for young journalist of the year in 1976. The following year, aged 26, she joined the Guardian as social services correspondent. Eight years later, while her children were toddlers, she was appointed news editor. In 1987, she moved away from editing and launched her column, leading her to explore the views that eventually meant that she felt she wouldn't fit in at the Guardian any more: "It was like a really horrific family argument, " she said. She left the Guardian in 1993, taking her column to the Observer and the Sunday Times before joining the Daily Mail in 2001.

Since then, she has often been too easily damned, with critics turning to personal attack rather than sticking to the arguments. Of course her bold assertions can lead to her getting it badly wrong – she was one of the loudest voices of the anti-MMR lobby.

But attacks can sometimes seem unduly ad hominem. The Observer's Nick Cohen, who has often disagreed with Phillips's views, wrote a powerful piece in 2011 in which he claimed that in some quarters she had become a "demon", with an element of misogyny in play. "No male writer gets the kind of going-overs that she receives as a matter of routine," wrote Cohen.

In her own account, Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain, published last week, she writes: "A good school freed me from a suffocating, lonely life. But wanting the same for every child made the left detest me." The black-and-white 1950s photograph that accompanied the newspaper extract of her book shows a smiling but distant girl in starched school uniform: beret perched on her head, tie tightly knotted, trenchcoat tightly belted. She is a serious, earnest person who once took great offence when one of her Guardian colleagues recommended she watch Absolutely Fabulous. "I can see what the joke is," she replied drily. "That the daughter is the mother to the mother." This was not funny.

In the memoir, she rails against declining standards in Britain, the neglectful culture of the NHS and what she now remembers as "anti-woman prejudice" when she worked as the Guardian news editor. ("Even the trip to Lord's didn't turn me into one of the lads.") When Phillips later wrote about her brand of feminism in her book The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, "the response from the sisterhood was apoplectic". Phillips claims that a handwritten note appeared on a noticeboard in the Guardian offices: "Melanie Phillips may be a woman but she is not a sister."

In her favour, she is seen as a columnist who tends not to make personal attacks and who, perhaps unusually, sincerely believes every word of the diatribes she writes. One virtue of the memoir is it is uncharacteristically intimate and passionately argued. She may make you uncomfortable, but she's never uninteresting.

When journalist Jackie Ashley met Phillips for the Guardian in 2006, she described the encounter as "like interviewing a human cactus". They met in a cafe and Ashley wrote that she was tempted to order a cake throughout the interview but decided not to do so in Phillips's presence because it "would be seen as a sign of moral weakness". I guess she won't be buying the mug.

• Melanie Phillips
• Ebooks

Viv Groskop
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The American book retailer saw its shares climb following reports Microsoft are considering offer to acquire Nook business

Shares in America's biggest books retailer Barnes & Noble climbed nearly 20% yesterday after a report that Microsoft is considering an offer to acquire its Nook business - B&N's tablet and e-book business and a rival to Amazon's Kindle.

The technology website TechCrunch reported that Microsoft, which already owns 17% of Nook Media, was proposing a $1bn offer to buy Nook's digital assets. Microsoft acquired its stake in the Nook Media unit a little more than a year ago in a deal that valued the entire business at $1.7bn. But Nook Media sales have been disappointing. Sales dropped 26% in the last three months as Nook sold fewer digital readers and tablets and had to cut prices.

B&N has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the unprofitable unit, trying to make its devices competitive against devices from Amazon, Apple and Google, among others.

B&N and Microsoft both declined to comment.

• Barnes & Noble
• Microsoft
• Computing
• Retail industry
• Tablet computers
• Ebooks
• Stock markets
• United States

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The iPad app of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps is breathtaking to look at but the storytelling is desperately slow

If you're intrigued by interactive storytelling and want to find out what the fuss is about, then take a look at the iPad app of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps. Made by Faber in partnership with the Story Mechanics, it is visually stunning and technically brilliant, lovingly crafted and faithful to the novel. An unbelievable effort has gone into creating a pitch-perfect 1910s feel, from the illustrations and sound effects to the virtual props, including old facsimiles of the Observer.

It is, in short, the most impressive example of interactive storytelling I've seen. Thing is, I'm not sure I like interactive storytelling.

Not from a literary purist standpoint – a bit of a lost cause with The Thirty-Nine Steps. No, my objection is more fundamental: I find interactivity exasperating. Prod, prod, prod to reveal gobbets of text, trace code symbols with your finger to unlock a door, search for a notebook and tap to look inside: it's engaging for five minutes, but then it's just tiring. Especially because the pace is determined not by you, but the app.

The graphics may be beautiful, but pausing every few minutes to pan around a room or take in a vista of London makes the whole storytelling business desperately slow. It was over an hour before Richard Hannay made it to Scotland.

Maybe they picked the wrong book. It's quite a risk to take on a novel so famously adapted by the master of suspense. If anyone out there is making an app of Rebecca, forget it.

But I think, ultimately, interactive storytelling is a matter of taste. The Thirty-Nine Steps app wasn't for me, but I can see how it could make someone else – someone with a lot of patience – very happy.

• iPad
• Apps
• Fiction
• Ebooks

Anna Baddeley
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EL James's erotic trilogy and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games novels topped the books charts last year and contributed to an overall rise in digital and print sales for 2012

Fifty Shades author EL James's blend of romance and erotica has helped to drag the book trade out of the doldrums, with new statistics showing that 2011's decline in sales has been reversed and a record amount was spent on books in 2012.

The rise in the book trade's fortunes was driven by digital developments, with total digital sales up by 66% to £411m in 2012, and total fiction ebook sales up by 149% to £172m, according to figures released by the Publishers Association.

The trade body said digital book formats – audiobook downloads, online subscriptions and ebooks — accounted for 12% of the total invoiced value of book sales, up from 8% in 2011 and 5% in 2010.

In 2011, print sales fell as digital rose leading to an overall decline in the market of 2% to £3.2bn. In 2012, physical book sales were down by 1%, but the digital success meant the book market grew by 4% overall, reaching a record-breaking £3.3bn.

"The fact is that the vast majority of books sold in the UK are print books," said Jon Howells at Waterstones. "These figures are reassuring, reminding us what we know – that people are still buying physical books and that, while obviously the take-up in ebooks has been significant, a lot of it is new custom, rather than replacing physical sales.

"We said from the beginning that ebooks were giving people another approach [to reading], just as they have already got now when they listen to music or watch television."

The recovery was led by the British public's insatiable appetite for erotica, with James's three Fifty Shades titles taking the top three spots in the print chart in 2012, according to figures from Nielsen BookScan.

The first novel in the trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey, sold 4.46m copies last year, the second sold 3.16m and the third 2.9m. Although there are, as yet, no official ebook charts, Fifty Shades of Grey also topped the Bookseller magazine's analysis of the bestselling ebooks of 2012, selling 1,609,626 copies, according to the magazine.

James' unprecedented success meant she became the first author to be named publishing person of the year by US book trade magazine Publishers Weekly. As the mainstream press presaged the end of civilisation, it pointed out that the Fifty Shades trilogy "helped boost print sales in bookstores and turned erotic fiction into a hot category" as it awarded the prize which is "reserved for those shaping and, sometimes, transforming, the publishing industry"

In the UK, fiction had a particularly strong performance in 2012, headed by James and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy. The first novel in the series sold 832,350 copies in print last year and 405,000 ebooks, according to the Bookseller. Total fiction ebook sales up increased by 149% to £172m, said the Publishers Association, while physical sales of novels was up by 3% in 2012, brininging in £502m.

Fifty Shades was initially a piece of online fan fiction before being released by a tiny Australian press as an ebook and then being signed up by publishing powerhouse Random House

Howells acknowledged the impact of Fifty Shades on the healthy 2012 figures. "You can put a lot of it down to EL James – she came completely out of nowhere," he said. "But although she started out digitally, it is in print that she sold vast numbers of copies."

He said there were some genres in which the digital takeup had been very significant – he singled out popular fiction – but said it was making less of an impact elsewhere. "For more illustrated titles, and for children's books, it has been much less," he said. "When it comes to Christmas, when most retailers make most of their money, people are buying ereaders as presents, but how do you wrap up a digital book? The books people are buying are hardbacks. We sold an incredible number of copies of [Venetian cookbook] Polpo, a £25, lavishly illustrated, beautifully bound product, something which can't be replicated online."

Digital sales of non-fiction and reference books have grown significantly, according to the Publishers Association. They were up by 95% in 2012, to £42m, compared with print sales for the category of £767m.

The trade body's statistics are based on data compiled from about 270 publishers representing 78% of total UK publisher sales.

Richard Mollet, chief executive of the Publishers Association, said the sales figures showed that "British publishing is a healthy industry which continues to grow". He added: "The continued increase in digital sales across different disciplines illustrates the shift of readers to ebook reading."

• Publishing
• EL James
• Fiction
• Retail industry
• Booksellers
• Ebooks

Alison Flood
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The choices offered by digital publishing can only be good news for writers, says Barry Eisler. So why are traditional publishers so angry?

Until November 2007, when Amazon introduced the Kindle, the only viable means of book distribution was paper. Accordingly, a writer who wanted to reach a mass audience needed a paper distribution partner. A writer could hire her own editor and her own cover design artist; she could even hire a printing press to create the actual books. The one service she couldn't hire out was distribution. And publishers didn't offer distribution as an à la carte service. If a writer wanted distribution, she had to pay a publisher 85% of her revenues for the entire publishing package: editorial, copyediting, proofreading, jacket design, printing, and marketing, all bundled with distribution.

Was a price of 85% of revenues a good deal for this packaged publishing service? For some writers, it clearly was. JK Rowling became a cash billionaire via the traditional packaged publishing service, and obviously there are hundreds of other examples of authors for whom the packaged service has represented a good value.

But for every author who wanted and benefited from the packaged service, there were countless others who took it – if they could get it at all – only because they had no alternative.

Digital distribution has provided that alternative. And increasing numbers of authors are choosing it.

Digital book distribution is available to anyone who wants it. What in the paper world requires trucks, warehouses, a sales force, and longstanding relationships with buyers at dozens of retail operations, in digital is a push-button à la carte service offered by companies like Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google, Kobo, and Smashwords. An author so inclined can buy digital distribution for 30% of the list price of the book she's publishing – the same digital distribution a legacy publisher offers – and outsource all other publishing functions, all for significantly less than legacy publishers charge for their packaged service.

Tens of thousands of writers newly presented with the lower-priced, à la carte choice of self-publishing are taking it. Many others prefer the traditional route. Some are embracing a hybrid approach, doing one book with a legacy publisher, another with Amazon Publishing, and yet another by self-publishing.

Now, there's nothing unnatural about this, you might think. Or undesirable. I myself have published books with legacy publishers, with Amazon Publishing, and via self-publishing. The various possibilities all have their advantages and disadvantages, there's no one-size-fits-all solution, and different routes will make sense for different authors. What matters is that authors make informed choices – because, for the first time, we authors are fortunate enough to have choices to make.

And yet, when I offered these fairly axiomatic observations during a recent keynote at the 21st annual Pike's Peak Writers Conference, the reaction among some editors and agents in the audience (and elsewhere) was extremely negative, with some walking out; others taking to Twitter to urge others to leave, to boycott my talks, and to boycott conferences where I'm talking; and a fair amount of name-calling.

The hostility is surprising in one sense (we're just talking business, after all, not politics or religion), but in another sense it's readily understandable. Because in essence, what I was describing in my talk was how digital distribution has changed the legacy publishing industry from something a writer needed, into something a writer might merely want. Because of digital, legacy publishing, which used to be a necessity, is now only potentially useful.

Bear in mind, "useful" is not at all a bad thing. It doesn't mean no one will want you. No one "needs" a BMW, after all, and yet BMW manages to sell millions of its cars to people who like to drive them.

But if your worldview, your conception of your rightful place in the universe, has always been informed by the implicit knowledge that you are indispensable, and tens of thousands of authors are now informing you that you'll have to account for your value or they will take their business elsewhere, it's not so inconceivable that you might find your sensibilities temporarily shocked.

Hopefully, the shock will lead to action. Necessities in business are rare, after all. They're called monopolies, and their customers typically revolt at the first opportunity. But businesses without a monopoly position – which is to say, almost all businesses – manage to thrive all the time while being "merely" useful. If so many other businesses are able to thrive because they are useful, there's no reason to believe legacy publishers can't do so, as well.

We have to be careful not to conflate publishing services with the entities that have traditionally provided them. The services are essential; the entities are not. This would seem a fairly obvious point, and yet as thoughtful and experienced a person as novelist James Patterson is now calling for a bailout of the legacy publishing industry, apparently because he fears that publishing is dying.

No. Publishing isn't dying; it is evolving. Authors understand this, and are embracing it. Legacy publishers need to do the same.

• Ebooks
• Publishing

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Amazon's bid for rights to sell secondhand ebooks adds another layer of complexity to a world where the certainties of print culture are dissolving

"My brain," as one reader put it rather dramatically, "fell over at the thought of selling 'used' ebooks". He wasn't the only one. The reaction to the news earlier this year that Amazon had a patent to sell secondhand ebooks was almost universally strong: it could ruin authors' livelihoods, said some commenters. It was dangerous for publishers, said others. It's just boggling my mind, said most.

These are the details we have: the patent is for an "electronic marketplace for used digital objects", where "when the user no longer desires to retain the right to access the now-used digital content, the user may move the used digital content to another user's personalised data store when permissible and the used digital content is deleted from the originating user's personalised data store". Amazon has not commented publicly about it, and it's possible that the book retailer may not be planning to do anything at all with the patent – that it was a defensive move.

But add it to the news last year that a Kindle user had her entire library wiped by Amazon without warning and the fact that, a few years ago, readers woke up to find that their digital copies of various books by George Orwell had vanished from their Kindles, and the possibility that ebooks could be sold as secondhand goods becomes another reminder of the sheer slipperiness – the intangibility – of the mushrooming digital product.

It used to be that a book was published, and that was it. Permanent, physical, tangible, it could be referred to for as long as the copy survived. That's not the case any more. We live in a world where page numbers – if they exist at all – don't correlate from device to device, where digital text can be updated at the touch of a button, where the ebooks we own can vanish without our say-so. It's something which is becoming a real issue, particularly for academics.

"I think it is a very grave problem," says Robert Darnton, scholar, author and Harvard University librarian. "If you're citing a digital version of a book, often you can't cite the pages." He adds that that documents have always been slippery – "there's no definitive text of King Lear" – but the ease with which it is now possible to make changes to published ebooks means "you take a problem like that, multiply it by 1,000, and that is the world we are in."

The issue is compounded, he says, "by the fact a lot of digital texts suffer from faulty editing, not to mention the hands of the scanners [appearing on pages]". He promises that the Digital Public Library of America, which launched last week, will "redo a lot of digitisation and make it right", as well as build in the capacity to make precise references.

"It is a mess, this world of digital texts," says Darnton. "We are living in a very fluid moment. Everything's changing. Nothing seems stable."

Angus Phillips, director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes, agrees. "They are starting to put page numbers in some ebooks, and you can do percentages, but it is a bit irritating when you want to reference the pages," he says. "When you're reading and you want to look back, yes, ebooks have got a great search function, but with a physical book, I can flick back. Put [a term] into a search function, you might get 30 different references."

He also worries about what the possibility to update ebooks will mean for quality. "For authors, the printed book means you've finished and that's the final format – you can't keep revisiting it," he says. "You want the author to know this is the final version. If authors have 10 bites of the cherry, will they concentrate as hard as if they think it's the final version? There's a feeling with the web that you can put something up there, and people can change it. One of the advantages of books is that they're permanent."

The ability to update ebooks is there, however. "Publishers can make changes to their books and send us updated files any time," says an Amazon spokesperson.

But "we don't want to be in a situation where someone's book changes without them knowing – that would be bad practice," adds Michael Tamblyn, Kobo's chief content officer. "We do have it in our ability to provide alternative editions of material but it doesn't happen that often – it's a fairly rare thing. Most publishers are very conscious of the integrity of a published book – certainly as a consumer you wouldn't want your book to get shorter, for example."

Amazon says that at present, "if a new version of a book becomes available, the customer is notified and gets to choose if they would like an update, and they can do this in an automated way. They also get to keep their place in the book as well as their notes and highlights."

Textual slipperiness aside, there's also the gnarly issue of who, exactly, owns an ebook. John Scalzi, bestselling novelist and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is up in arms over Amazon's secondhand ebooks patent (it was on his blog where the reader's mind fell over).

"We don't know exactly what Amazon's planning to do with this. Every tech company out there files patents for things, but they don't necessarily have a plan to use them," he says. "On the other hand … there is likely to be interest in a secondhand market for electronic books, and the question then becomes how we balance the consumers' rights with the simple fact that pristine electronic copies of books are likely to undercut the incomes of the creators."

Scalzi can understand why consumers might be interested in selling on their ebooks – but "is an electronic file exactly the same as a physical object?" he ponders. "Some say absolutely, no matter what, if you buy it, you've bought it. Others say, if I have a book and take it to a used book store, when I give them the book, it's gone, whereas with an electronic book, it's possible I can make a copy for my archive, and resell the pristine-looking copy."

The issue, it seems, boils down to two things – does a reader own an ebook, or the licence to read an ebook? (Amazon's Kindle terms state that "Kindle content is licensed, not sold, to you by the content provider".) And is it possible to trust readers who wish to sell on their used ebooks not to have secretly made a copy, or two copies, or hundreds of copies, which they're handing out to all and sundry?

"If a large company like Amazon begins selling used works, are people who conscientiously go out of their way to buy books rather than pirate going to see a difference between a new file and an old one, one of which goes to pay me, and the other doesn't?" wonders Scalzi. "It's a very real concern for writers and other creators."

But he isn't panicking quite yet, because he believes that if Amazon, or another online book retailer, begins to sell used ebooks, there's likely to be a whole lot of legal action. "The legal ramifications are fascinating. If Amazon or whoever start selling these electronic files, and it could be proved that someone had made a copy, then we're looking at a really interesting class action suit. It could take years to go through court, and the legal right to sell could get halted while it went through the courts. That would do two things – give writers and publishers some time to figure out the ramifications, and have an effect on consumer behaviour. Regardless of what happens, nothing about this is going to come easy or simply or without a huge amount of legal litigation and ramifications," says Scalzi.

The novelist doesn't think the changes are all bad. "It is part of the overall conversation of what happens when an industry shifts. And in every shift in technology there will be some positives and some negatives."

Darnton, too – despite all his worries – is feeling positive. "As things change new possibilities open up, but we need to reach a point where we can stabilise at least the textual element. That's part of the mission of the Digital Public Library of America."

• Ebooks
• Publishing
• Amazon.com
• Internet
• E-commerce

Alison Flood
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Faber trails 'fully immersive' version of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and a bespoke ebook using digital format to rethink conventional narrative

Fiction edged its way closer to a digital incarnation with the publication this week of an interactive visual version of John Buchan's classic thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Publisher Faber&Faber announced that it had up with two software publishers and a developer, The Story Mechanics, to create a "fully playable, fully immersive product" which it believes breask new ground in digital reading.

It said the app includes classic stop-frame animation and original silent film music. It would allow readers to "unlock dozens of achievements and items to collect on their reading journey, and explore hundreds of hand-painted digital environments and context from 1910s Britain."

Published originally as a serial in Blackwoods magazine in 1915, The Thirty-Nine Steps was the first of five novels to feature the 20th century's earliest and most famous action hero, Richard Hannay, a man constantly on the run.

Buchan described the novel as a "shocker" – an adventure so unlikely that the reader is only just able to believe that it could really have happened. A number of film and TV adaptations, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 version, have taken the book beyond the printed page, but Faber promises another step beyond Buchan's original storytelling.

Henry Volans, head of Faber Digital, said: "The Story Mechanics have come up with something completely new in the landscape of fiction ebooks. It's a new way of reading with John Buchan's story at its heart, presented afresh through a TV and gaming-inspired lens." The Thirty-nine Steps will be available for iPad, Mac, and Android tablets.

Faber also took advantage of this week's London Book Fair to introduce another innovative piece of fiction, Arcadia, by Iain Pears – which will be published in digital form in the autumn, with a book following next year.

Demonstrating the structure to publishers, Pears explained that the novel was inspired by quantum physics, and written in "nodes" which had been mapped on to a graph constructed after consultation with an Oxford mathematics professor.

The aim was to create an infinite number of ways in which the story could be read – though Pears emphasised that Arcadia was not an interactive novel. "I'm still in charge of the story because I'm arrogant enough to feel that I'm a better story-teller," he said.

One result of its format, he said, was to get the story beyond the constraints of time. "It also gets rid of causality. I use the analogy of dropping a cup and causing it to break. It's also possible that the cup breaking causes you to drop it."

The novel is being constructed in partnership with a software developer and a digital designer and will be rewritten for the print version, which will be "like the director's cut", said Pears.

Volans said: "Too often publishers ask themselves how they can bolt something on to a finished novel, like retro-fitting a car. This is posing a much more profound challenge: it's a novel in conceived form written on bespoke software."

• London Book Fair
• Publishing
• Ebooks

Claire Armitstead
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Author's speech to London Book Fair calls for an experimental approach to a changing 'digital frontier'

"Anyone who tells you they know what's coming, what things will be like in 10 years' time, is simply lying to you," according to the author Neil Gaiman, fresh from a provocative speech at this week's London Book Fair where he urged major figures in the book business to "try everything. Make mistakes. Surprise ourselves. Try anything else. Fail. Fail better. And succeed in ways we never would have imagined a year or a week ago."

Gaiman, the award-winning author of the Sandman comics, American Gods and the children's novel The Graveyard Book, was the keynote speaker at the book fair's fifth Digital Minds Conference, where the international publishing world's leaders gathered to debate "the future of publishing". But with 1.8m Twitter followers to his name, and as one of the first author bloggers, Gaiman told delegates that his "only real prediction is that is it's all changing".

Going against a column yesterday in which Booksellers Association chief executive Tim Godfray argued that Amazon was the "foe", and has "the ability to destroy the book trade as we know it", Gaiman believes that "Amazon, Google and all of those things probably aren't the enemy. The enemy right now is simply refusing to understand that the world is changing".

The novelist went on to urge the assembled publishers to be more like dandelions – an analogy he stole, he said, from Cory Doctorow.

"Mammals spend an awful lot of energy on infants, on children, they spend nine months of our lives gestating, and then they get two decades of attention from us, because we're putting all of our attention into this one thing we want to grow. Dandelions on the other hand will have thousands of seeds and they let them go where they like, they don't really care. They will let go of 1,000 seeds, and 100 of them will sprout," Gaiman told the Guardian.

"And I was really using that analogy for today, saying the whole point of a digital frontier right now is that it's a frontier, all the old rules are falling apart. Anyone who tells you they know what's coming, what things will be like in 10 years' time, is simply lying to you. None of the experts know - nobody knows, which is great.

"When the rules are gone you can make up your own rules. You can fail, you can fail more interestingly, you can try things, and you can succeed in ways nobody would have thought of, because you're pushing through a door marked no entrance, you're walking in through it. You can do all of that stuff but you just have to become a dandelion, be wiling for things to fail, throw things out there, try things, and see what sticks. That was the thrust of my speech," said the author.

Gaiman said he didn't "ever recall giving a speech and walking off stage and thinking that went down like a lead balloon quite as much" – but then he picked up his phone, and saw the positive Twitter feed about his talk. "Instead of applause … what I got was a tweet feed which went 'oh, they loved it'," he said.

• Neil Gaiman
• Publishing
• Ebooks

Alison Flood
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With ever-expanding digital libraries, digital reading platforms must become more open to languages other than English

Diglot Books is a small, independent publisher based in Buckinghamshire, specialising in bilingual books for children. Their first title in 2011 was an English-Dutch ABC book that uses words with the same initial in both languages: banaan and banana, leeuw and lion, regenboog and rainbow.

For St Piran's Day this year, Diglot wanted to release an ebook in English and Cornish of one of their bestsellers, Esmee Carré and Paul Wrangles's Matthew and the Wellington Boots. But after submitting the book to the Kindle store they received a notification from Amazon that "the book is in a language that is not currently supported by Kindle Direct Publishing". It turns out that the list of Kindle's supported languages is a short one of 10: while it includes Catalan, Galician and Basque alongside the major western European languages, there's no Cornish – nor is there Welsh, Dutch or a number of others that Diglot publishes in. Despite appeals to the fact that Cornish uses exactly the same character set as English, pleas to Amazon Support fell on deaf ears. Luckily, a bit of publicity and the interest of the Cornish Language Board seemed to get their attention, and (without explanation) Matthew ha'n Eskisyow Glaw is now available from the Kindle Store, as well as iBooks and Diglot's website.

The issue of languages in ebooks is likely to be with us for some time, however. As device manufacturers expand into new territories, the range of languages requiring support increases. A March 2013 study showed that while English is still dominant on the internet, at 54.7% of all pages, others, including Kindle-unfriendly Russian, Polish, Turkish and Arabic at numbers two, nine, 11 and 12 respectively, are gaining fast. To keep up with the expanding digital libraries, our reading tools need to be more open too.

• E-readers
• Ebooks
• Children and teenagers
• Kindle
• Amazon.com
• Languages
• Written language

James Bridle
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As the new list of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists is published, being a novelist has never been so confusing

Representatives of the book industry from all over the world will converge on Earl's Court for the London Book Fair on Monday; the briskest of trades in international rights is the fair's primary purpose, but in between their back-to-back half-hour appointments, the publishers, agents, retailers and auxiliary publishing professionals also need to be entertained and informed. Workshops, panel discussions, seminars and interviews abound, their subjects ranging from cover design, children's literature, film adaptations and anything and everything to do with Turkey, this year's featured country.

In the digital zone, you might attend sessions with titles such as "e to eternity", "Project Managing Digital Assets" and "The Future is HTML5", which can only be more fascinating than it sounds. The really keen will go along today to the Digital Minds conference, described as "a must-attend precursor" to the fair proper, at which the keynote address will be given by award-winning novelist Neil Gaiman. Its subject? "Exploring models of online storytelling and reader engagement."

Fast forward to Tuesday morning, when another panel will convene to discuss Granta's Best of Young British Novelists list, the fourth of these once-a-decade snapshots of hot, youngish (under 40) talent, which will be announced on Monday. Having helped to judge the last list and having perhaps foolhardily made my predictions for this round, I've been invited to take part in the event. And whatever the selection, there's one aspect of the list that I feel confident will come up in the discussion: what kind of landscape are these writers coming of age in? In the years to come, will there be readers to read their books? How will they read them? And, most crucially, will they want to pay for them?

Anyone who says they can read the runes of the modern publishing industry is either deluded or a charlatan – and possibly both. It was hardly a stable picture when the last BOYBN list came out, added to which, publishing, like many industries, revels in tales of its own demise. But whether or not one sees the situation as mired in doom and gloom or poised on the brink of iconoclastic rejuvenation, it is certainly in furious flux.

If confirmation were needed, it came last week from one of bookselling's most famous figures. Tim Waterstone, who founded the chain that still bears his name in 1982 before selling it in the 1990s, announced his involvement in an e-book company called Read Petite, which will publish short-form fiction and non-fiction of fewer than 9,000 words or so and sell it via monthly subscription. In an interview with the Guardian, Waterstone was fairly upbeat about the view from the high street, yet many will feel he hit the nail on the head with this concise summary of the challenges facing bricks-and-mortar retailers: "The arithmetic does get more and more difficult."

Having been owned by WH Smith and then HMV, Waterstones now belongs to Russian businessman Alexander Mamut, who appointed James Daunt, already the owner of the small London chain Daunt Books, as its managing director. Daunt's own shops cater for a certain type of book-buyer: they are elegant spaces filled with high-end reading material and staffed with knowledgeable and enthusiastic booksellers. They ooze discernment and, as their locations in Chelsea, Holland Park and Marylebone suggest, they have an undeniable class association. They are not pile-'em-high, sell-'em-cheap merchants.

Some years ago, I recall wanting to buy a reasonably expensive, prizewinning hardback as a Christmas present and popping into Daunt's to do so. None remained. The bookseller was beyond frustrated; he couldn't get the publisher to commit to a restock delivery date and he couldn't, therefore, guarantee he'd have copies in time for Christmas. I went home and ordered it, at half the RRP, from an online store. A week ago, having once more been unable to find a new release in a bookshop (not a Daunt's), I saw its Kindle version for sale on Amazon for less than a quid. Those "daily deal" promotions are, obviously, loss leaders and, as their name suggests, they don't last for ever.

Recently, trade magazine The Bookseller published its analysis of the impact of a 20p price point on ebook sales. The highest-selling of the 20p titles was Life of Pi, which added 423,133 ebook sales to its already substantial print sales. Life of Pi has had a long and successful career, and we can safely assume that its author, Yann Martel, has made a decent living from it. But when words come that cheap, what's the cost to less well-established writers?

One development has been a greater pressure on them to market themselves; via festivals and other live events and on traditional and social media. The chatter around books – which their publishers always hope will become "buzz" and, even better, translate into "word-of-mouth success" – is greater than ever, and much of it is very enjoyable; the creation of readers' communities often yields unexpected insights and recommendations. Whether it translates into hard cash is trickier to quantify; and how damaging the threat to writerly solitude yet to be seen.

Elsewhere, innovation thrives. The independent publisher And Other Stories, which last year hit the headlines when one of its authors, Deborah Levy, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, set itself up as a community interest company; it is run on not-for-private-profit principles. It encourages readers to contribute ideas and allows those on its mailing list to join in its acquisitions meetings; it is happy to publish material that is not immediately obviously commercial. Last week, it announced that it is to set up a base in New York. And Other Stories keeps its overheads low and its goals tightly focused; it relies on the books to do the talking.

Other enterprises are even more upfront about the urge to democratise an industry that has been seen, however unjustly, as the preserve of cultural gatekeepers. Unbound, for example, with its no-nonsense "Books are now in your hands" slogan, starts reader involvement even earlier in the process; writers share their ideas for new work and readers pledge money if they like the sound of it. If the putative project hits its target, the writer can start work; and the more money you pledge, the greater your "reward" – you might get your name on the back of the book, and you might even get to have lunch with the author.

A rapidly changing market is likely to see plenty of initiatives fall by the wayside. But however unconventional their commercial model, however cutting-edge their platform or mode of delivery, publishers will still need raw material – even when, as with EL James, the author of Fifty Shades of Grey, and bestselling young-adult writer Amanda Hocking, it originates as self-published material. Indeed, many publishers and agents now spend a significant portion of their time scouting for the next self-publishing sensation.

To what extent will these changes affect what we are reading? The resurgence of interest in the short story, which lends itself to electronic devices and limited attention spans, shows technological change can also benefit traditional literary forms. It will, of course, also change them. American writer Jennifer Egan followed her much-praised novel A Visit from the Goon Squad with "Black Box", a short piece of fiction that was first released by the New Yorker as a series of tweets; one a minute for an hour, for 10 days. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the experiment was its mutability; the work of art was different according to whether you followed it in real time, scrolled through Twitter at a later point or, as I did, waited until the whole thing was collected and put out as an ebook.

This kind of freedom is simultaneously the most tantalising and the most terrifying challenge facing the new crop of Granta-ites. Fiction has always morphed and adapted itself to cultural and environmental changes; novels appeared as weekly newspaper instalments, for example. But the speed of those shifts and the range of possibilities is unprecedented. Who knows what the Best of Young British 2023 will be getting up to?

• Publishing
• Ebooks
• Booksellers
• Granta

Alex Clark
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Acorn, according to publisher OR Books, is an extension of the 'intricate strands' Ono first wove in Grapefruit, published in 1964

"Poetry in action with participation," is how artist and musician Yoko Ono describes her new book of "instructional poetry" – the first she has published solo in almost 50 years.

Acorn, according to New York-based independent publisher OR Books, is an extension of the "intricate strands" Ono first wove together in Grapefruit, the "book of instructions and drawings" she published in 1964. The book, which comes out in June, is "classic Yoko", said the publisher, "full of intriguing and surreal exercises [which invite] the reader to uncover profound and often complex truths, in words and imagery that are playful and accessible".

"It's something I originally created for the internet," said Ono. "For 100 days, every day, a different instruction was communicated. Now it's being published in book form. I'm riding a time machine that's going back to the old ways! Great! I added my dot drawings to give you further brainwork."

With Grapefruit released through major publisher Simon & Schuster, it's an unusual choice for Ono to pick the tiny OR Books this time. OR pitches itself as a "new type of publishing company". It is highly selective, releasing just one or two books a month on a rapid turnaround schedule, and publishes only when books are ordered by readers, either through print on demand or ebooks, bypassing the traditional book trade. Recent titles include Julian Assange's Cypherpunks – one reason Colin Robinson believes he secured Ono's book ahead of bigger names.

A flavour of Acorn can be found in "Dance Piece III", in which Ono advises her readers to "Take your pants off / before you fight." In "Line Talk", she writes: "A line is: a) a sick circle. b) an unfolded word. c) an aggressive dot. d) what you want to erase. e) what you regret after you dish it out." In "Life Piece IX", she proposes: "Get a piece of rubber the size of your palm. / Imagine yourself stretching the rubber / to cover the world with it. / See how much you can cover. / Hang the piece of rubber / on the wall beside your bed."

Elsewhere in the book she suggests, "Walk from where you live to where your friend lives. Be aware of the turns and the views while you walk. / Walk back the same way. / Be aware of the turns and the views your friend experiences / when he or she visits you."

Grapefruit was described as "one of the monuments of conceptual art of the early 1960s" by art critic David Bourdon. It included an introduction from John Lennon - "Hi! My name is John Lennon. I'd like you to meet Yoko Ono". The Beatle also added: "This is the greatest book I've ever burned." It featured pieces such as "Tunafish Sandwich Piece", in which Ono writes: "Imagine one thousand suns in the / sky at the same time. / Let them shine for one hour. / Then, let them gradually melt / into the sky. / Make one tunafish sandwich and eat."

Robinson, who previously worked with Ono on the republication in 2001 of Lennon's interviews with Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone as Lennon Remebers, said that Ono's "commitment to social justice and environmental concerns, expressed in artistic forms that are adventurous and beautiful, precisely mirrors the values we are seeking to build our publishing programme around". OR's rapid publication schedule means the book will be published in June, exclusively available from the publisher's website, with international rights on sale at next week's London Book Fair, where it is likely to be a hot property.

• Yoko Ono
• Poetry
• Publishing
• Ebooks

Alison Flood
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Thirty years ago, Tim Waterstone founded one of the UK's best-known booksellers, and is still in love with the idea of bookshops. So what is he doing starting a new ebooks venture?

Tim Waterstone's house in Holland Park, west London, sits on the edge of a small cluster of book-industry landmarks. Round the corner is the HQ of Granta, the publisher and literary quarterly. Just as close is a sumptuous branch of Daunt Books, the six-shop bookselling company owned by James Daunt, now also managing director of the chain Waterstone founded in 1982, these days owned by the Russian tycoon Alexander Mamut. The nearest Waterstones is a 10-minute walk away in Notting Hill, an outlet its former owner would occasionally visit when it was managed by HMV – and, as he saw it, going to the dogs, at speed.

In an imaginary movie of his life, you can picture the scene: the principal character stealing a look at his life's work and wondering what on earth had happened. "What I hated, to the point that I couldn't sleep at night, was that I thought it was being badly run, and going backwards," he tells me, while shooing off one of his cats. "It was just agony to me. I felt HMV were screwing it up, and I couldn't stand it. Every time I walked to the tube station, past that shop, I could hardly bear to look in the window." He felt it had drifted too far from the simple business of selling books.

Waterstone – a calm, candid presence, some distance from anyone's idea of a big retail player – will soon turn 74. After three unsuccessful attempts to buy back the chain that bears his name, he assisted in its latest change of hands, and though his involvement now extends to little more than the occasional lunch, he says he is confident that it's back "in proper ownership, with a very, very good business plan".

Mamut, with whom he has worked on a bookselling venture in Moscow, is "a very cultured, literary figure. Most unusually for a Russian oligarch, I must say." He laughs. "But genuinely so." Waterstone can now concentrate on his fiction writing: two short novels are on the way, following four already published. (Of these, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, which drew on his experiences in the corporate world, got the most attention.) Then there is his life as a venture capitalist, which has led him to invest in wholefood shops, magazine publishing and cosmetics.

He is also about to return to bookselling as non-executive chairman of a new venture called Read Petite. This will be launched to the trade at next week's London Book Fair, and to the public in the autumn. An online outlet for short-form ebooks (fiction and non-fiction), its users will pay a monthly subscription – "a few pounds" – and have unlimited access to texts of around 9,000 words or under.

But this is no literary Spotify, offering hundreds of thousands of items with little quality control: Waterstone is insistent the service will be "curated" to ensure a high standard. Authors will have appeared in traditional print, and have been brought to Read Petite by a publisher. "The individual short story, or whatever it is, may not have been published, but the author will be an established, published writer," he says, drumming his fingers on the table to emphasis those last three words. "The whole point is to avoid a slush-pile of material. What we'll guarantee is quality writing."

Read Petite's name was inspired by Reet Petite, Jackie Wilson's 1957 rhythm and blues classic. One of its key players, former Bookseller editor Neill Denny, has come along to further explain what it is all about. The pair are particularly excited about the chance to serialise new fiction à la Charles Dickens, reintroducing readers to the long-forgotten art of the cliffhanger. They enthuse about how e-readers seem to have increased people's appetite for short-form writing. In the US, the New York Times has reported on a resurgence of the short story, benefiting new and established writers. We talk about such short-story masters as Somerset Maugham, Stephen King and Annie Proulx, and why the publishing industry has never quite managed to market the form.

"A lot of the best short fiction has never been properly exposed, because publishers don't find it commercially comfortable," says Waterstone. His bookselling business did have success with Graham Greene's short stories, but such successes were rare. "Even with a collection, how do you package it? It's difficult in print: traditionally, money was used up on production and distribution, and not enough was left for promotion. In the digital world, production costs are virtually nil, and distribution costs don't exist, so you're left with a much cleaner sheet."

They plan to publish journalism, too. By the sound of it, they have not quite firmed up how deals with writers will work, but as Waterstone puts it, "if the site works, if the total subscriptions are high enough, it should leave a decent sum". Time, then, for a rude question. How much is Waterstone in for?

"Personally?"

Yes.

"That's too rude for me to answer," he says, smiling.

It comes as no great surprise that Waterstone owns a Kindle. The last book he read on it, recently, was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. When he first used one, though, he felt a sharp pang of fear. "I think I went through a crisis: [was it] the end of Waterstone's, and the end of the book trade? I was incredibly depressed. I pretended I wasn't, but inside I was churning: 'Maybe I should die now.'" He laughs.

He now thinks that, for the time being, ebooks and print can coexist. Nonetheless, the high streets on which so many shops still bear his name are in unprecedented crisis. For the moment, Waterstones (it lost its apostrophe in 2012, apparently to make online business easier) may be safe, but plenty of equally renowned names have gone under, and the future of the town and city centre is clouded in doubt.

Talking about this, Waterstone sounds by turn ambivalent, uneasy and open about the idea that no one knows where things are headed – but also somewhat optimistic. Town-centre rents, he explains, are finally coming down. His own chain is getting back to the idea that the shops "should be a theatre. It should be a lovely place to be on a Sunday afternoon. The physical browsing process is enormously pleasant. It's an important part of our national culture, those bookshops."

A pause. "But the arithmetic does get more and more difficult, and online retailing gets more and more seductive. And all of us get more and more used to it, from grocery supply to buying books off Amazon. Yet I go to the Westfield shopping centre down the road, and it's turned out to be an absolute goldmine, heaving with people all year round. Anyone who tells you they know the future is telling you the most grotesque lie, because none of us do."

Among the high street's casualties, of course, is HMV, which bought Waterstone's from WH Smith (who had acquired it in 1993), at the end of the 1990s. Waterstone himself was HMV's chairman from then until 2001, and it was during that period that his nightmare began. So how did he feel watching HMV go under?

"I brought Waterstone's into HMV in 1998," he reminds me. "HMV stores at that time were extraordinarily successful, and very well run. I used them a lot: I thought they were a tremendous public service. I think some terrible decisions were made by the HMV management in the following decade. They blinded themselves to what was happening. Too slow to react, too slow to face the truth. The issue of downloading – they were always reactive rather than proactive in trying to find a way through. They should have led. I'm sad, really sad, as a consumer. But I've got children of 18 and 19, and they've got no interest in HMV whatsoever. All their music is downloaded. The switch has been so precipitate in that market."

Bookselling remains more balanced. Amazon – about which Waterstone has mixed opinions, recognising their role in growing UK book sales, but decrying their "absolutely outrageous" tax manoeuvring – claims to be selling more ebooks than printed titles. As a whole, though, the market is still dominated by print: at the last count, ebooks made up 9% of the total. While the number of e-reader users grew by 150% through 2012, that rate of growth is predicted to slow. In other words, the digital reading revolution goes on – but more gradually than you might imagine.

"Robert McCrum, former literary editor of the Observer, rang me about a year ago," Waterstone recalls. "He said, 'Tim, I'm doing yet another piece on "Whither the book?" For God's sake give me something new.' I said, 'I've done this so often.' He said, 'Well, have a go.' While I was talking, I walked to the other side of the house, where my daughter's bedroom is. She's 19, at Oxford, reading English. I walked in, and I could hardly move for books. And she couldn't be more technically savvy … so I rang her and asked, 'Why have you got so many physical books?' She said, 'I like having a Biro in my hand, scribbling notes down the side.' So I see the two forms sitting side by side."

But what if people only have a finite book budget? If they spend x pounds on ebooks, won't that mean x pounds not spent at a traditional shop? And in that sense, might even new ventures such as his contribute to the eventual demise of a lot of what he holds dear?

"That's behaviourally too complex a question, because none of us really know what happens," reckons Waterstone. "I am certain that if more people acquire the habit of reading, the more they'll stick with it and the more they'll read. And if that's going be entirely digital in 50 years time, so be it.

"They'll be reading," he says, glancing at two shelves of novels behind him. "And that's a great thing."

• Booksellers
• Short stories
• Ebooks
• Waterstone's
• HMV
• E-readers
• Gadgets
• Fiction
• Retail industry

John Harris
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A government-commissioned report has allayed fears that digital lending could damage the book industry

Library users should be able to borrow ebooks from home, according to a government-commissioned report into e-lending. This is great news for anyone who agrees that lending ebooks is a crucial part of a modern library service, especially as e-readers get more affordable.

The Sieghart review was set up to look into the issue after publishers and the Society of Authors raised fears that e-lending could damage the book industry. Any worries seem to me to be based on two shaky hypotheses: that people who borrow never buy (in fact, library users buy more books than the average person) and that people who read ebooks don't buy print books (actually you are more likely to buy a print book if you own an e-reader).

There is no logic in allowing libraries to lend physical books and not electronic books, so long as proper controls are in place. The Sieghart review sensibly suggests that digital lending should echo physical lending – forcing ebooks to "deteriorate" after a certain amount of loans, for instance. It also recommends the long-overdue extension of public lending right (PLR) to e-loans.

Curiously, the report made no mention of the world's biggest bookseller, Amazon, even though the retailer has its own subscription-based digital lending library and recently acquired a patent for selling secondhand ebooks. Worryingly, Amazon also allows customers to return, and get full refunds for, ebooks up to seven days after purchase. Even if you've read them. The organisers of a petition campaigning for an end to this easily abused policy claim it is "like going into a restaurant, buying a meal, then asking for a refund after you've already eaten it". In this context, any lingering doubts about library e-lending look increasingly immaterial.

• Libraries
• Publishing
• Amazon.com
• Ebooks

Anna Baddeley
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iSpeech could dramatically cut the cost of audiobooks. Shame the reading voice sounds like a bus announcement

Last week iSpeech, a text-to-speech startup, announced that it had acquired its first publishing client: Pearson. Claiming "the most natural-sounding TTS audio on the market" and previously known for driving-direction applications and audio cues for the home, iSpeech wants to help publishers automate the creation of audiobooks. The default voice on iSpeech is pleasantly lilting, but it's still definitely not human, and more akin to a pre-recorded bus announcement in its odd pauses and stumbles. Pearson intends to use the service primarily with textbooks; the robotic voice is definitely not ready for the emotional range and styles of fiction yet.

Text-to-speech has been tried many times before, but it's technically very difficult to pull off, and legally complex. Amazon got into trouble in 2009 when it rolled out basic text-to-speech for the Kindle. Publishers said that Amazon was abusing its copyright and it withdrew, much to the chagrin of, among others, the blind and partially sighted community, reliant on audiobooks, who briefly gained access to Amazon's vast library. The problem is the cost of creating an audiobook. This involves studio hire and voice talent and can reach thousands of pounds, which is often difficult to justify in sales, while iSpeech offers automation costing just fractions of a penny per word.

But while the cost of creating quality audiobooks prevents much contemporary work being made available, older work is being "acoustically liberated" by collaborators on the internet. LibriVox, founded in 2005, recently passed 6,500 books in its collection: all in the public domain, all recorded by volunteers. LibriVox's moderators assemble teams of participants who take a chapter each. While the tone might sometimes vary as much as iSpeech's robot, LibriVox's enthusiastic volunteers are now putting out three classic audiobooks a day, a victory for networking the passion of readers.

• Audiobooks
• Ebooks
• Amazon.com
• Kindle
• Pearson

James Bridle
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The differences in format are beginning to change the nature of what we're reading, and how we do it

Most readers, I think, will by now have seen the "Medieval Helpdesk" sketch from Norweigan TV, where an exasperated monk requires assistance to start working with a new-fangled and daunting "book". It's fun – if loopily anachronistic, the codex having been around since the 1st century AD. But it does rest on a presumption that I'm increasingly beginning to question: that technological changes to the way we read affect only the secondary, cosmetic and non-essential aspects of reading. There is a kind of bookish dualism at work. The text is the soul, and the book – or scroll, or vellum, or clay tablet or knotted rope in the case of quipu – is the perishable body. In this way of thinking, the ebook is the book, only unshackled from paper, ink and stitching. If the debate about the ebook is to move on from nostalgic raptures over smell and rampant gadget-fetishism, it's time to think about the real fundamentals.

There are two aspects to the ebook that seem to me profoundly to alter the relationship between the reader and the text. With the book, the reader's relationship to the text is private, and the book is continuous over space, time and reader. Neither of these propositions is necessarily the case with the ebook.

The ebook gathers a great deal of information about our reading habits: when we start to read, when we stop, how quickly or slowly we read, when we skip pages, when we re-read, what we choose to highlight, what we choose to read next. For a critic like Franco Moretti, the author of Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, this data is priceless. For publishers, it might very well come with a price tag. What would publishers do with the data? If 50% of readers stopped reading your postmodernist thriller at page 98, the publisher might recommend that for Version 2.0, the plot twist on page 110 be brought forward. While the book's relationship to the reader is one of privacy, with the ebook we are all part of an unacknowledged focus group. Would the small codices containing The Gospel of St John or Tom Paine's Rights Of Man have had the impact they did if each and every reader were known before they had opened the first page?

This segues into my second contention. China Miéville, at last year's Edinburgh World Writers' Conference, raised the idea of "guerrilla editors" – readers remaking the text, much in the manner of the fan reaction to The Phantom Menace, The Phantom Edit. As Jaron Lanier argues in his new book Who Owns The Future? the largest digital companies compile huge amounts of information on our likes, dislikes, economic activity, preferences, attention spans and such like. What happens when this information is recycled into the "reader-specific" book? Such things have existed in a rudimentary format – my parents bought my youngest brother a book when he was about five, where the central character was also called "Gordon" and the house he lived in was in a village called "Lilliesleaf": the ur-text behind it would have run something like "Once upon a time a [boy/girl] called lived in a place called ". I can imagine the same phenomenon now on a vastly more sophisticated scale: an EL James-esque book where, based on my digital trace, Christian listens to Alban Berg not Thomas Tallis and Anastasia's doctorate is on Christine Brooke-Rose not Thomas Hardy. It could even change over time: in this hypothetical book, the characters shop in Lidl. When I go back to reading it, after receiving an advance for my next book, they suddenly shop in Waitrose. What this means is that when I say to a friend "Have you read such-and-such a book?", even if they answer "yes", the real answer may be "not exactly".

Robert Darnton, the director of the University Library at Harvard is a kind of glorious bibliographical fundamentalist: in The Case For Books he shows, elegantly, that it's not good enough for Google to digitise one of each book; for any intellectual rigour they need to digitise every edition (the old "every First Folio is unique" argument). It is certainly true that there are subtle differences in reading Tom Jones in different editions – the 1749 The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, in Four Volumes is a different experience from a Penguin Classic (and very different again from the softcore porn of The Illustrated Tom Jones (Anderson 144). But the differences might best be compared to hearing Beethoven's 9th Symphony as conducted by Karajan and as conducted by Roger Norrington. The printed book – the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction par excellence – is astonishingly stable over time, place and reader.

The book, seen this way, is a radically egalitarian proposition compared to the ebook. The book treats every reader the same way. It manages to balance the solipsism of reception and interpretation with a communal, agreed space in which those interpretations can be discussed.

Once these features of privacy and continuity are acknowledged, the ebook might well come into its own. Could the e-reader support texts that could be read only if more than one person were reading it – and what issues of trust might that raise? Or that could only be read at specific times and in specific places? Could there be texts that no one reader has access to in their entirety, and if so, what communities of interpretation might grow up around them? (In this case, TV and film are far ahead of publishers; with things like the ARG The Lost Experience – a video game based on the programme Lost – and the Batman-centred "Why So Serious?" campaign.)

Realising the specific nature of the book ought to make us more considerate of what the form does achieve, and could well unsettle the ebook into being more daring. It wouldn't be a book, but it might be something as yet unthought.

• Ebooks

Stuart Kelly
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His Dark Materials author 'both honoured and excited' to succeed PD James leading writers' lobby group

Philip Pullman is to succeed PD James as president of the Society of Authors - the "ultimate honour" awarded by the British writers body, and a position first held by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Pullman, the award-winning author of the children's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, will take over from James on 3 August, the crime writer's 93rd birthday and the date she has chosen to retire as president. James said she was delighted that Pullman had been elected by members of the society to replace her. He will "face a far more complex and challenging world for writers than did I when I was elected, but no one could be better qualified for the task," she said.

Paying tribute to James as a "magnificent president, whose knowledge and wit and wisdom will be very hard to follow", Pullman described himself as "both honoured and excited" to be taking on the role. "The Society of Authors has been representing and supporting the work of writers for 130 years, and now that we're in the middle of one of the greatest revolutions in printing and publishing and reading there has ever been, the society's experience will be needed more than ever," he said.

Pullman talked to the Guardian about the likely challenges he'll face in August. He "fully support[s] the call for Amazon to pay tax in this country" – a key issue for the book trade with a petition launched by independent booksellers Frances and Keith Smith now supported by more than 100,000 signatures. "Independent booksellers are an immensely valuable resource not only to the communities in which they exist but to the wider community of writers who create the books they sell," Pullman said. "A vast corporation like Amazon, able to (I must be careful with the word here) avoid tax in this country by paying it in Luxembourg, or whatever they do, is a threat to the survival of independent booksellers, who do pay their full UK tax in a socially responsible way, and it needs to be countered."

He also intends to continue the society's fight for authors to be paid when their ebooks are lent from libraries – "I think PLR on ebooks would be a very good thing" – and will maintain the pressure authors have been putting on local authorities to keep libraries open. "Libraries benefit everyone. In fact it's hard to think of anyone who'd be harmed by the existence of a library," said Pullman. "The benefit of having a library in your neighbourhood, or a mobile library that comes to your village (as one does to mine), is enormous."

Pullman has previously been highly vocal in the campaign to save libraries. He gave a passionate speech to Oxford campaigners two years ago in which he compared cuts to "the fanatical Bishop Theophilus in the year 391 laying waste to the Library of Alexandria and its hundreds of thousands of books of learning and scholarship".

• Philip Pullman
• Libraries
• Amazon.com
• Publishing
• Ebooks

Alison Flood
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The first in a quartet of digitally enhanced thrillers is utterly gripping – even if the adds-ons are merely decorative distractions

I was a little sceptical before reading Sutler, the first in a quartet of digitally enhanced literary thrillers by Richard House, published by Picador (£1.99; free if you tweet about it).

My biggest fear was that I would be the wrong sex to enjoy it. The plot – man goes on the run after being accused of embezzling money from his employer, a company involved in postwar reconstruction in Iraq, and is pursued by an insurance loss adjuster – didn't immediately appeal. My choice of thriller tends to be domestic and psychological.

I'd also read an interesting review on the blog Bookmunch by someone who had liked the ebook, but was miffed at not being able to access the enhanced features (you need a device that can handle video and audio), and wondered if they were simply a marketing gimmick.

Happily, my first set of doubts evaporated a few pages in. Sutler races along but has depth too, in its characters and filmic description of landscape. Richard House is a film-maker and artist as well as a novelist. He might have made more of the political backdrop (cursory references to Kurds and insurgents weren't enough) but maybe he will in later books. I finished Sutler desperate to start the next one, The Massive, which comes out on 28 March.

As for the enhancements … while I loved the short films of Cuba, Istanbul and Reims Cathedral that cropped up every few chapters, their effect was more to make me yearn for a holiday than add anything to the story. If you're going to the trouble of embedding audio and video, then go the whole hog and make it integral to the plot. Otherwise it's little more than a decorative distraction, and frustrating to people who read the unenhanced text.

• Ebooks
• Thrillers
• Fiction

Anna Baddeley
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From the typewriter to the word processor and beyond, technology plays a pivotal role in the literary process

One day in 1968, workers removed a window from a house in Merrick Square in Southwark in order to install a large piece of newfangled machinery; the size of a large desk and weighing more than 200lb, it required a crane to lift it. The machine was an IBM Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST) and the house belonged to Len Deighton. Deighton would use it to write his second world war novel Bomber, which has a good claim to be the first novel written on a word processor. The story of Deighton's MT/ST, published last week in Slate magazine, drew thousands of comments, likes and tweets, underscoring our enduring fascination not just with literature, but with writers and the writing process.

The MT/ST had a limited ability to record and rewrite, but it served Deighton's needs admirably, allowing him and his assistant, Ellenor Handley, to revise passages without entirely retyping them. In pre-MT/ST days, Deighton literally put his books together with scissors and glue: by 1984, the first personal computers had automated this too. Science fiction author William Gibson recalled his fellow writer Bruce Sterling calling him up to tell him: "This machine changes everything… you can chop it up, move bits around, you can airbrush the joints… and you can file the serial numbers off anything."

This process deeply influenced the writing of their collaborative novel, The Difference Engine, a collage of original and Victorian text. These tools are now part of every writer's apparatus, highly configurable and influential. One of the most popular specialist writing tools is Scrivener, a long-term personal project of British developer and writer Keith Blount, who started writing the software to help complete his own novel. It's now used by thousands of writers, who are fulsome in their praise of a piece of software that is an intrinsic part of the writing process. As Deighton's MT/ST and Sterling's Apple assisted their work in new directions, so Scrivener and its ilk may even now be shaping new styles in literature.

• Ebooks
• Computing
• Apple
• Len Deighton

James Bridle
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Get advice on blogging from the likes of Roy Greenslade, Owen Jones and the Guardian's social media team

Whether you want to establish yourself as a journalist, develop your knowledge of a niche subject or simply vent some anger, blogging is the perfect way to flex your writing skills.

But there are gazillions of blogs floating around on the world wide web. How do you ensure yours doesn't get drowned out?

Compiling advice from editors, columnists and social media experts, Guardian Students have put together an Ebook to help you get started. How to Blog is a step-by-step guide with tips on everything from picking a subject to honing your writing and promoting your work.

What's inside:

• Roy Greenslade, Guardian columnist and former editor of the Daily Mirror, takes a look at how blogging has changed journalism

• Owen Jones, Independent columnist and author of Chavs, explains how his blog led to a career as a writer

• The Guardian's social media expert Laura Oliver offers her advice on promoting your work and developing a readership

• The Guardian's style guru David Marsh gives his top tips for sounding stylish

• Judy Friedberg, editor of Guardian Students, explains what makes a good blog and how to get your writing published on Blogging Students

How to get a free copy:

Join Guardian Students. It only takes a minute to become a member and is completely free. We'll send you a welcome email with a link to the Ebook. All members receive a weekly newsletter bursting with student news, blogs and offers.

• Students
• Higher education
• Ebooks

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