Technology

Just in time for the back-to-school season, iPad interactive textbook publisher Inkling has secured $17 million in Series B funding from investors including Tenaya Capital, Pearson Education, Jafco Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

Inkling works with textbook publishers to rebuild existing textbooks for the iPad, incorporating search, quizzes, note-sharing, audio and video other interactive features. Students can preview free sample chapters and can also buy textbooks by the chapter, starting at $2.99, through Inkling’s store.

Editor's note: Huffington Posts' Anis Shivani interviews publishing visionary Richard Nash. Check out Richard Nash's Guest Column in the September/October issue of Book Business, coming soon!

I've been intrigued by Richard Eoin Nash since the time he ran the indie press Soft Skull Press in the 2000s. His new enterprise is Red Lemonade/Cursor, a reader/participant-oriented publishing venture hoping to take full advantage of the social potential of new media. I recently had the opportunity to talk to him via email about the future of publishing in a rapidly changing landscape.

Folks looking to make a quick buck have turned to selling spammy and stolen e-books on the Kindle Store. A few months after the problem first made the news, it appears that Amazon has started cracking down.

These e-books are either plagiarized copies of copyrighted works by other authors or are thrown together from “private label rights” content, which can be bought very cheaply online and quickly formatted into an e-book. Some software bundles hundreds of thousands of PLR articles together. DVDs like “Autopilot Kindle Cash” makes the process as close to automatic as possible.

While Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) grab most of the headlines these days, Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) lingers like a sleeping giant. But not for long. What Amazon has planned could challenge both tech giants in one fell swoop.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that Amazon will release a tablet PC by October. As more details emerge, we get a clearer picture of what Amazon will offer.

… There are even rumors surfacing … that Apple may be considering acquiring Barnes & Noble, Inc.

With companies such as Twitter, Financial Times and InMobi all recently committing to HTML5, the technology-in-the-making appears to be picking up steam at a faster pace.

HTML5 is actually a loose term referring to a group of new technologies – many not launched yet – that are intended to improve the Web browsing experience through richer interactivity. While the belief has been that HTML5 is several years off, the fact that a growing number of companies are embracing it now brings this into question.

E-books provide a great opportunity for providing the visually and otherwise impaired with access to books which they would otherwise not have access.

A novel e-reader, long thought dead, has risen from the grave.

Polymer Vision, a Philipps spin-off, unveiled the Readius back in 2008 (at right). This was a truly unique device with a 5″ folding E-ink screen. Unfortunately the company lost their funding in 2009. …

I’ve been getting “we’re not dead yet” updates for 18 months now, and I can finally show you the new design. … There’s no word yet on when it will be released, but at least we know it’s still under development.

The Nook Color has always been considered a wannabe Android tablet and the latest update makes the 7–incher more tablet than ereader. Previously, modders opened up the platform to all sorts of Android tomfoolery, allowing users to run nearly stock Android builds that brought email, proper web browsing and apps to the device. Never mind that nonsense, Barnes & Noble just added those features themselves.

(Press Release) Falls Church, Virginia, February 15, 2011—Aptara, a pioneer in digital publishing solutions, announced today that its PXE digital publishing platform has reduced Wiley-Blackwell's turnaround time by more than 75% for six of its medical, pharmaceutical, and physics journals.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the first commercially-successful ebook, but many would give a nod to Stephen King’s novella Riding the Bullet.