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Despite being taught not to judge a book by its cover; when the metaphors are out the window, we all judge books by their covers. Book shops are full of novels and biographies with thousands of typography variants, surface textures and colours just asking us to pull them from the shelf and look inside.

Covers don't hold as much power over readers in the digital world (yet), they are barely seen at all and when they are they're not big enough to grab your attention and pull you in, we often turn to peer reviews and rating systems to act as our new cover. The failure to transition well to digital is not a flaw in covers as a concept, instead it's our own reluctance to re-write the rule book when new technologies arise that can be blamed for the down-grading of the cover.

As the nights draw in, most of us would rather be at home snuggled up with a glass of mulled wine and the latest episode of The Apprentice. What could tempt you out of those comfy Fair Isle jumpers more than a good Digital Publishing event? Here are our pick of the top 8 unmissable events this winter.

Many of the brightest and best publishers have beautiful digital editions of their magazines, but with one fatal flaw: they are exclusive to iPads.

We see this mistake being made time and time again, both with long-established editions, and fresher publications. Excuses from editorial teams are wide-ranging, but all follow a similar theme: that cross-platform publishing is too difficult and simply isn't in demand.

At a tech talk on digital editions at the UK Publishers Association (PPA) in London last week one of the panelists was typically direct. ‘We think replica editions are a crime against humanity,” said Jon Marks, co-founder of HTML app builders Pugpig.

As their business is predicated on turning magazines into HTML apps, and they have no place for replicas in that process, he is not unbiased. But agreeing with him were two replica companies: Zinio and Pixelmags.

Vlogging took off shortly after YouTube became a household site. A hybrid of video and blogging, thousands of vloggers post regular videos; from gaming vloggers to beauty and comedy. Some have achieved immense fame, so much so that they are now releasing books.

I found this an unusual idea, why not release a series of vlog's telling their story instead of writing a book? Why take these internet celebrities away form their natural habitat and onto paper? It seems a backwards way to do things to me given our digitalised world.