Financial Times

Profits at the book publisher Penguin slumped by almost 50% in the first six months, thanks in part to the runaway global success of EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey, which is published by a rival, Vintage Books.

The runaway success of Fifty Shades and The Hunger Games helped cut sales at Penguin by 4% to £441m and its adjusted operating profit down 48% to £22m.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos introduces the new Amazon tablet called the Kindle Fire on September 28, 2011 in New York City. From their strongholds on the American West Coast, companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple, and Amazon have used the Great Recession as an opportunity to think big, invest, and take the world by storm with their products and services. All four of these firms’ success is obviously and irrevocably linked to technology. But one of these companies — Amazon — is a tech company that is firmly rooted in the age-old industry of retail, in the quotidian business of

Art and cookery specialist Phaidon Press is up for sale, with owner Richard Schlagman looking for another owner to lead its transition from print to digital. Investment bank Greenhill has been appointed to conduct the sale, and is understood to be in the early stages of the auction process, sending out information to prospective buyers, according to reports. According to Companies House, Phaidon's annual revenues were up 17% in the year to June 2011, to £25m, with a pre-tax profit of £411,000 for the year, following a pre-tax loss of £149,000 for the previous year. In July 2011,

André Schiffrin, 76, a leading figure in the New York book publishing world, quit Pantheon in 1990 to establish a not-for-profit independent publishing house, The New Press, explaining that economic trends prevented him from publishing serious books.

Schiffrin describes the crisis in Western publishing in his 2011 book, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. In 2010, in Words and Money, he commented on the role of conglomerates in the newspaper and film business.

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.

Book clubs—of the Book of the Month Club, "get 10 books for a dollar" type, not the Oprah variety—were once an essential revenue stream for the book publishing industry, with millions of customers buying discounted books directly. But today, with deep discounts and wide selections offered by online retailers, book clubs have become much less important to the publishing industry. In a nod to changing times, Random House parent company Bertelsmann is now closing Direct Group, its book clubs and direct marketing division, effective June 30.

This week, the iPad app world is frantically sorting through some recent changes in its environment. Apple has quietly altered its app approval policies in a way that will make publishers – in particular, subscription-based publishers like The New York Times – much happier.

Specifically, Apple has relaxed its control over whether apps can access content paid for outside of the App Store’s purchase APIs. The company has also given control over pricing content back to publishers, allowing them to price however they want, both outside and inside of the app.

Today Attributor, a leading provider of technology and services that enable publishers and digital content creators to track, analyze, and monetize their content on the web, launched the FairNotice Feed for publishers and content hosting sites.

Olive Software and Plastic Logic have announced a partnership that will enable major magazines, newspapers and online publishers to distribute their content on Plastic Logic's forthcoming eReader

A commercially viable, point-of-sale, print-on-demand (POD) option—a device capable of creating a single perfect-bound paperback book at a time—has remained, up until this point, beyond the book industry's reach. With the announcement last week of New York-based On Demand Books' newest version of its Espresso Book Machine, set to roll out early next year for initial testing, the current age of printing and distribution as we have come to know it may be on the verge of a major transformation.