Digital media makes it possible to work in new formats. The medium-length work, between a book and an article, promises to open up a new variety of scholarly communications.
Blackboard is the target of speculation about a takeover, the WSJ reports. What might this mean?
The disintermediation of publishers and libraries is more difficult than many suppose, as each link in the value chain does in fact add value to the process of scholarly communications.
The New York Times is likely to introduce institutional pricing now that it is beginning to charge for consumer access.
The recent brouhaha about HarperCollins’ policy of restricting ebook circulation in libraries misses the larger point that libraries and publishers can work toward satisfying their respective interests.
The new Google Ebooks have made a mess of many popular classics in the public domain.
A report by the AAUP outlines the business models available to university presses and makes a case for ongoing subsidies by parent institutions.
Business models for publishers fall into four broad categories, defined by how revenue is generated. Some classes of content lend themselves to one model over another.
Maligned though it often is, the Big Deal for journals is likely to get bigger, marginalizing the offerings of smaller publishers.
A report on book circulation at the Cornell library invites speculation as to how book publishers will have to continue to market their books even after they are sold: aftermarketing.
Vestron’s Law refers to the propensity for the rights to content to revert to the original publisher. The Law applies to all media types and accounts for some of the industry’s structural changes.
Books take the shape of their containers, and the containers in turn shape the kinds of books we create. The new ebook containers have different affordances, which must be studied to develop a successful ebook program.
New publishers today are all Born Digital in their outlook, eschewing print strategies as expensive and difficult to break into.
It’s been a reckless year marked by books becoming cannon fodder in the platform wars.
The data-mining of the Google books database has great promise, but who owns the data-mining rights?