For all that BookMachine is emphatically not a site about the merits of individual books, it hopefully doesn’t come as a shock to any regular visitors that we’re all readers nonetheless, and that, as readers, we enjoy some books more than others. For my last post of the year, then – and, to be honest, mainly so I seemed less onanistic than if I had done this alone – I asked my fellow contributors to the site to pitch in on the best things we read this year. Stick two fingers up to the Mayans and join us when we return in January.

This week on the site, we were Revisiting elearning in the Web 2.0 age with Anna Faherty, and Felice Howden asked What Game Is Anobii Playing? Meanwhile, the London Literature Festival announces 2012 line-up, and Century buys rights to Wool, inevitable sheep jokes.

Elsewhere on the  web, it appears that Amazon aims to launch front-lit Kindle in July and Amazon launches CreateSpace in Europe.

As Pottermore adds Kobo as a Harry Potter e-book partner, and apparently Moglue Makes It Dead Simple For Anyone To Create And Publish Interactive Ebooks, there’s A Humorous Yet Truthful Look at Publishing, and The Book Designer is asking: Are You Trying to Create an “Impossible” Book?

And then there’s the big questions: Paper Book vs. Digital Book – Who reads which, where and why?

Finally, it appears that In E-Reader Age of Writer’s Cramp, a Book a Year Is Slacking.

It’s pretty well documented that January is the most depressing month of the year if you live in the UK. We’ve got nothing to look forward to except the two long months between now and the possibility of Spring, which, to be honest, is likely to be late, cold and disappointing. It seems commentators in the book world have caught this negativity virus as I’ve read more articles bleating idiotically about the demise of the printed/edited/published world this year already than I did for all of December, but let me assure you there is plenty to be excited about this year in publishing. Before we all top ourselves, let’s run through a few things that have gone right lately.

In the style of so many 90s TV shows, the short story is making a comeback, and if you think Captain Planet is cool as hell, you ain’t seen nothin’. While huge publishers like Random House, and… booksellers, Amazon, are now discovering something most of us have known for years (that short fiction is the greatest writing there is) there are a bunch of publishers out there who have been promoting the form for longer than I’ve been alive.

Felice Howden, Writer and Digital Media Production assistant at OUP, writes really well so  we were really excited to read her review of last week’s party. Want to read it to? Bet you do.