Content Strategy

Fan-Sourced Taylor Swift Book Coming from Simon & Schuster
December 17, 2015 at 10:49 am

Swifties, get ready: You have a book to write. To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Taylor Swift’s first record, Simon & Schuster will publish the first major book about the superstar artist, EW can announce exclusively. And it’s her biggest fans who are providing the content. The book, coming on Oct. 24, 2016, will be…

How Amazon Came to Dominate Fiction in Translation
December 11, 2015 at 2:09 pm

The unwillingness of English-speaking readers to engage with fiction in translation has come in for its fair share of criticism over the years, not least from the director of the Edinburgh book festival, Nick Barley, who described the UK’s parochial reading habits as “something of an embarrassment” this summer. Help, however, might be at hand…

The Ever-Growing EdTech Market
November 18, 2015 at 2:53 pm

Every few months, a new study claims that gadgets in the classroom don’t improve learning—but that hasn’t stopped the educational technology market’s steady upward climb. The edtech market totaled $8.38 billion in the 2012-13 academic year, the most recent year the Education Technology Industry Network has such information available. That number is up from $7.9…

Rodale Inc. and Rodale Books to Launch Rodale Wellness
October 6, 2015 at 2:20 pm

Rodale Inc. and Rodale Books will launch Rodale Wellness. This project will serve as an online hub of wellness-related content and a commerce website. Some of the items being posted include a daily newsletter, a workout playlist, and exercise demonstration videos.

Forget the Book, Have You Read This Irresistible Story on Blurbs?
September 28, 2015 at 11:50 am

Whatever the old adage might warn, there is a bit of merit to judging a book by its cover — if only in one respect. Consider the blurb, one of the most pervasive, longest-running — and, at times, controversial — tools in the publishing industry. For such a curious word, the term "blurb" has amassed…

Why Ad Blockers Will Help Content Evolve
September 21, 2015 at 1:28 pm

Ad blocking is one of the more controversial features of Apple’s new iOS release. Apple prefers to call it “content blocking,” but it’s mostly intended to block all those pesky website ads that nag us every day. Publishers are, of course, totally freaked out at the prospect of their content being consumed without monetizing the…

Thinking About Internet Scale
July 21, 2015

Those of us who labor in scholarly publishing can be forgiven for thinking that the world is a tiny place. The academic journal, the keystone of our industry, cumulatively brings in about $10 billion a year, not enough to get the CEOs of Uber or Pinterest out of bed in the morning; and the book, the much-despised book, is in retreat everywhere. While librarians continue to insist that there are huge publishers out there, corporations so big that they have a stranglehold on the academic community, if not the world overall, the actual figures