The IDPF and the W3C recently announced they were making plans to merge. Will this merger be good for publishers by integrating them more closely into the community that manages the web infrastructure? Or will the merger result in diminishing publisher control over one of the important distribution standards for digital texts? The past five years of experience doesn’t give reason to be reassured of the outcome.
Robert Harington asks Tim Collins for his views on publishing industry trends seen through the prism of his leadership role at EBSCO, exploring Tim’s sense of a connected world of stakeholders in today’s publishing industry.
Google wins in court (again) as the Second Circuit of Appeals rules that its mass book digitization program qualifies as fair use. But Google is a commercial entity! And their files might get hacked! And their library partners are even more susceptible to copyright pirates than Google is! Yes, said the court, but. . .
Want to see 500,000 books moved to a new location?
Last week, Amazon won an auction for the .book Top Level Domain on the internet, paying $10 million for the new real estate. Was it worth it? And should publishers be worried about what this means for them?
At the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, a pre-meeting session was held called CONTEC. This follow-up to the much beloved, but now defunct, O’Reilly Tools of Change conference brought together an interesting mix of leadership from traditional […]
A startling new breakthrough in reading technology from an unlikely source.
A short video explaining the costs that go into producing a book, and how little difference there is in those costs between electronic and print books.
Interlibrary loan is a complex and difficult issue in the realm of ebooks. A new tool called Occam’s Reader hopes to simplify the process for libraries, provide better service to users, and reassure publishers worried about rights management.
Businesses are using more data than ever to inform decision making. While the truly large Big Data may be limited to the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, publishers are nonetheless managing more data than ever before. While the technical challenges may be less daunting with smaller data sets, there remain challenges in interpreting data and in using it to make informed decisions. Perhaps the most daunting challenge is in understanding the limitations of the dataset: What is being measured and, just as importantly, what is not being measured? What inferences and conclusions can be drawn and what is mere conjecture? Where are the bricks and mortar solid and where does the foundation give way beneath our feet?
Yesterday federal judge Denise L. Cote, of United States District Court in Manhattan, ruled against Apple in the United States vs. Apple Inc., et. al. ebook case. Anyone who thinks this isn’t a terrible outcome for publishers, authors, and readers, isn’t paying attention.
The university press world is operating under circumstances that are somewhat tighter than they were even a few years ago. While most presses now publish ebooks, ebooks in themselves do not provide a strategic path to growth.
The sheer number of new marketing programs for books makes it hard to determine just how much a book costs. This post details all the factors involved with pricing.
EPUB 3 reveals many smart advances, making EPUB a more viable direction than ever. And with the changing landscape of reading devices and customer preferences, even the vaunted PDF may feel the tremors.
A recent incident involving Amazon and a Norwegian reader has highlighted the sad state of ebook distribution on many levels.