Authors Electric

  I have just read two fantastic books about the publishing world of the last thirty or forty years. The first is Book Wars – The Digital Revolution in Publishing by John B. Thompson and the second is Ahead of Her Time , an autobiography from legendary publisher, Judy Piatkus. These two, very different, authors have both managed to capture clearly the world that I have been living in for all of my working life. John Thompson is a Cambridge professor and also author of the brilliant, Merchants of Culture . His new book is an extremely authoritative account of the revolution which at one time looked like it was going to destroy the fusty old world of book publishing, but has actually ended up reinvigorating it in ways that no one predicted. When you are actually toiling at the coal face of writing, it is easy to forget just how much has changed since the arrival of Amazon and ebooks, the explosion of the self-publishing industry and the invention of new ways of publishing such a...