An expert’s view on the future of work in 2025

From the rise of AI agents to the end of the office wars, futurologist Julia Hobsbawm shares her predictions for the year ahead.

The history and future of book covers: the influence of cover design within the publishing industry.

Most of us have wandered into a bookstore, become captivated by colours, textures and imagery and picked up a book based solely on the cover, without giving too much thought to the story inside. As keen readers, we’re used to analysing an author’s style, influences and intent, but how many of us have spent anything like the same amount of time pondering the genesis of the cover that’s been chosen to represent the book?

Q&A with Mark Watkins, Founder of The Hawaii Project

We spoke to Mark Watkins, the founder of The Hawaii Project, a new book discovery engine. Mark was previously CEO and co-founder of goby, a mobile recommendation engine for finding fun things to do, and VP of engineering at Endeca, a search platform, since acquired by Oracle. From his home in Hawaii, Mark told us about the motivation behind setting up the new platform, the difference between The Hawaii Project and other recommendation engines and what this means for self-published books.