Adobe

Despite the fact that Amazon clearly dominates book and eBook sales, a significant portion of the digital book publishing industry makes its home inside Apple's ecosystem. Many of those involved in books within the Apple App Store and iBooks Store come from the tech, design or app development side to things. Here, the book format is blended together with the app builder's mentality - make your book do something, make it flexible, updatable, and discoverable

For years, independent bookstores have taken creative steps to fight off challenges from Amazon and the superstores by building in-house espresso bars, hosting members-only lunches with authors and selling birthday cards, toys and trinkets. In 2013, it has come to this: Asking their customers for donations. Crowdfunding is sweeping through the bookstore business, the latest tactic for survival in a market that is dominated by Amazon, with its rock-bottom prices, and Barnes & Noble, with its dizzying in-store selection. It's hardly a sustainable business model; but it buys some time,

Ebooks get a lot of attention, but there is another publishing world that exists in parallel with the commercial publishing world we see and know. It is the shadow world that evolved from the copier and later the digital printer — for the first time, individuals could make their own books.

Tokyo, Japan -- June 28, 2013 -- Aquafadas, developer of digital publishing solutions, will participate in the 2013 Tokyo International Book Fair, held from July 3-6 in Tokyo, Japan. Aquafadas experts will showcase the latest digital publishing technology as well as participate in special customer presentations on real world examples of Aquafadas Digital Publishing workflows. “Aquafadas customers push the limits of our technology to produce super enriched digital publications. We’ve been working extensively with our Japanese business partner MSI to ensure Aquafadas Digital Publishing capabilities exceed market expectations and deliver on the imagination of the highly creative, tech-savvy Japanese publishing industry,” comments Claudia Zimmer, CEO of Aquafadas.

Bill McCoy, Executive Director, International Digital Publishing Forum, awarded the 2013 Innovation Award to Flipick, a cloud-based e-book production portal.

Rowman & Littlefield is pleased to announce that on the eve of Book Expo America, its e-book store is now open.

New York, NY, May 8, 2013 – From May 29-30, 2013, the best minds in digital publishing will convene in the Javits Center in New York City for the highly-anticipated, perennially sold-out at IDPF Digital Book 2013 conference (http://idpf.org/db13). This year’s theme, Advancing Publishing in a Digital World, has already drawn an enormous crowd, with seats expected to sell out soon.

Some featured speakers and session insights include:

• Otis Chandler, Co-founder and CEO of Goodreads will share an update and tackle questions from the crowd, including: what’s next for Goodreads now that it’s owned by Amazon? What does the recent sale mean for the 17 million members, 530 million books and 23 million reviews?

• Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author and staff writer for The New Yorker will speculate on the digital future with Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek writer and author of the upcoming The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Remember the old days when PDF was pretty much the only way to distribute content and those PDFs were read on computer screens? PDF still lives, of course, but now we're also faced with offering content in mobi and EPUB formats for consumption on a variety of platforms and devices.

SPi Global released a free whitepaper this week that covers the current state of formats and platforms. It's called Demystifying the King: Making Content Available to All and you can download it here.

Three independent bookstores have filed a class action suit against Amazon and all of the big-six publishers, alleging that the proprietary digital rights management tools Amazon uses on ebooks serve to create a monopoly. The indies say publisher contracts calling for the use of this DRM, which like most forms of DRM prohibits readers from copying ebooks or reading them on non-authorized devices, restrain ebook sales and that Amazon “has unlawfully monopolized or attempted to monopolize the market for ebooks in the United States.”

LinguiSystems, a publisher serving speech language pathologists throughout the United States and Canada, partnered with Sheridan Books for the technology that would enable them to sell ebooks from the existing e-commerce platform on their website — expanding the format options available to their consumers.“The publishing world is changing and we want to support our customers with new products, formats, and tools that help them experience greater success in the classroom” remarked Jim Johnson, Director of Production at LinguiSystems.