Lots to read in this article but two particlar notes:

1) Digital revenue now 11% or total revenue
2) ‘non-Larsson’ titles revenue rose 83%

In a sign diversification is working, Quercus on Monday reported that turnover from “non-Larsson” titles rose by 83 per cent year-on-year and now comprise an estimated 80 per cent of total revenues. Full results will not be released until later in the year.

Ebook sales rose from 3 per cent to 11 per cent of total revenues in 2011, and Quercus plans to further boost digital sales to more than one-third of total turnover within the next three years

via Quercus looks to life after Larsson – FT.com.

The BA has called for more free parking in town centres and a reduction in red tape to help struggling businesses.

It also argued that charity shops present “unfair competition” to bookshops due to the valuable tax breaks they get. There are more than 250 specialist charity bookshops in the UK, while a further 8,000 charity shops sell books as part of their ranges.

Tim Godfray, the BA’s chief executive, said that bookshops are facing “huge pressures from so many quarters”.

via Hundreds of bookshops face closure – Telegraph.

ON Homer Avenue in downtown Palo Alto is a tiny, two-story building that once housed the maker of Palo Alto Bread. It was here, in March 2009, that Barnes & Noble brought a few new hires to create the Nook. Outsiders weren’t quite sure what the company was up to. The landlord figured that Mr. Lynch wanted to open a store.

What began as an almost quixotic effort to catch up with the Amazon Kindle has now grown into a 300-person operation in the heart of Silicon Valley. Mr. Lynch has hired engineers, software developers and designers, who are today spread among five low-slung buildings.

via Barnes & Noble, Taking On Amazon in the Fight of Its Life – NYTimes.com.

US retailer Barnes & Noble is “developing a partnership with Waterstones to add the Nook to its locations this year”, according to reports on news site Bloomberg Businessweek which quotes an unnamed source “familiar with the situation”.

via B&N ‘developing partnership’ with Waterstones over Nook | The Bookseller.

Interesting news this:

NBC News has now entered the scramble, becoming the latest entrant in the e-publishing universe. The news organization is launching NBC Publishing, which will focus on turning out enhanced e-books using NBC’s current video and archival footage.

“We have over one million hours of archival video content going back to the ’20s and a really low cost structure to edit it and put it together,” Michael Fabiano, general manager of NBC Publishing, told Digital Book World.

via NBC News enters sizzling e-book publishing world – Political Bookworm – The Washington Post.

But at the same time as Apple is working with incumbents, it is also encouraging others to attack them. Much like the App Store democratised the creation of software and blogging platforms spawned new media companies, the iBook Author and Apple’s online bookstore will open up educational publishing to new companies and to individual academics who want to create their own texts. This will lead to an explosion of new textbooks, many of which will compete with those of existing publishers.

via Apple and digital publishing: A textbook manoeuvre | The Economist.

Without any formal advertising, Wilkinson’s first book, Locked In – first in a series of crime fiction novels – shot up the iTunes and Amazon book charts. “I got a Twitter message from someone I know, asking if I knew that my book was in the iTunes chart. I was somewhere around number 50. Then it just grew and grew.”

He sold his 100,000th copy on Christmas Eve, making it a “No 1 Amazon Kindle bestseller” in the UK. The selling price was 98p, with Wilkinson keeping 35% of that (approximately 30p after VAT). “It’s not as if I’m retiring to the Bahamas. I still work full time. It’s some extra money but it’s not a life-changing amount – not yet.”

via Kindle the fire to self-publishing | Money | The Guardian.

Interactive books with feedback and rich content on the iPad aren’t only for kids, of course; here’s a list of some with good grown-up oriented content. Plenty of companies have already been using the iPad as a platform to publish interactive kids’ books. A search on the iTunes Store will pop up everything from digital-only publishers like Atomic Antelope that build beautiful children’s stories for the iPad, to TouchyBooks and several interactive book versions of Disney movies. But we have heard Apple’s announcement is geared toward the younger end of the K-12 set, and this could fit with that idea. It also wouldn’t be a huge surprise if people took a new set of tools for building visual stories with rich content and ran with it and it eventually became much more popular outside of content aimed at younger kids and students.

via Will Apple make iMovie for interactive books? — Apple News, Tips and Reviews.

Finally, the men and women engaged in publishing need to be bold and exuberant. This is an extraordinary age for writing and reading, and it seems to me that this endeavour will go better if it’s done with a sense of purpose and pleasure, rather than defensively. It won’t turn out well for everyone currently in the business, but so what? If publishing is useful and creates value then it will be of value, whoever is doing it.

via The way ahead for publishing | Books | guardian.co.uk.

Depressing new research by Forrester indicates that book publishers are becoming increasingly disheartened about the state of the industry: Only 28 percent of publishing executives think their company will be better off because of the transition to digital, down from 51 percent a year ago.

via Study: Book Publishers’ ‘Optimism Waning’ As Digital Transition Continues | paidContent.