Quark Inc.

Quark has announced an update to QuarkXPress 9 that allows designers to export digital content directly to the Amazon Kindle format. The upgrade is available now for free to current QuarkXPress users. Complete Coverage Ratings Similar Articles QuarkXPress 7 The new Kindle support in version 9.3 allows users to export content directly to the Kindle format without conversion tools or plug-ins. This is especially helpful to small and self-publishers in reaching the growing Kindle ebook market faster and more easily. Using Quark 9's reflow features, users can get both the ePub and Kindle formats without additional time and effort,

At the end of April, Tor Books, the world's largest science fiction publisher, and its UK sister company, Tor UK, announced that they would be eliminating digital rights management (DRM) from all of their ebooks by the summer. It was a seismic event in the history of the publishing industry. It's the beginning of the end for DRM. That's good news, whether you're a publisher, a writer, a dedicated reader, or someone who picks up a book every year or two.

Falls Church, Va.-based digital publishing solutions provider Aptara has partnered with VitalSource, an Ingram Content Company, to make publishers’ content accessible to readers with disabilities. By providing content development and conversion services that now include tagging specifically for Section 508 of the Federal Accessibility Guidelines, Aptara’s publishing customers can utilize VitalSource’s new Bookshelf e-textbook platform.

As Steve Potash, CEO of Overdrive and president of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), said last spring at IDPF’s annual meeting: The world of digital books is expanding, and there is a steady flow of major publishers and technology providers adopting the .epub standard. What we’re going through now is a ramping-up stage during which it can’t be either/or—nobody is saying that we will accept or deliver only in .epub. Accepting only .epub formats is likely to be the first move that’s made, because the advantage to publishers is that they will have only one electronic book version with one ISBN of which

The concept of offshoring—the practice of sourcing manufacturing or content management services overseas—is no stranger to the book publishing industry. Complex four-color work has long been sent to countries such as Italy and Japan, where the labor-intensive processes of producing art books (hand-stripping, contacting and working with film) were more cost-effective. Today, the same advances in technology that have had such a profound effect on publishing in general over the last 20 years—digital prepress work, real-time tracking of projects through the supply chain and instantaneous sending of digital files, among others—have opened the door to a true global sourcing revolution. “With Mac, Pagemaker,

Publishers rely on the Internet or classified ads to spread the word about new positions, but how can you guarantee you will attract people with the best or even relevant skill sets? Furthermore, the more important question may be: Exactly what skill sets should you be looking for in today’s constantly changing publishing environment? Beyond the obvious characteristics any publisher would want in a new hire—intelligence, loyalty, enthusiasm, writing and editing skills, an eye for layout, business and marketing savvy, and so forth, publishers may wonder if they should expand the perimeter of the required skill set to prepare for embracing the multimedia

Quark Inc. announced last Wednesday that Raymond Schiavone, a veteran software company CEO and former GE executive, has joined the company as president and CEO. “Quark remains the best-of-breed choice for the creative professional, as demonstrated by our recent QuarkXPress 7 release,” said Schiavone. “Over the coming years, our customers will see us not only growing our product line, but also providing additional value through expanded strategic partnerships and focus on customer service and support. We will continue to lead the industry by bringing innovative solutions to market and providing state-of-the-art tools for creative professionals.” Acting president Linda Chase will remain with the company in

Content is still king in book publishing. The challenge to publishers today is to move, manage, exchange and manipulate that content in the most efficient and profitable ways. In the age of new media, publishers must be able to accept content from external sources, traffic it through all the pre-publishing phases and then be agile in the way they output it, so that it’s cost-effective but also meaningful to readers. As with any new technology, publishers should evaluate software solutions with these basic considerations in mind: Functionality: What solutions out there have the types of capabilities your company needs? Once the field has

When nurses need to find out the latest drug information—whether to verify a dose, check for possible interactions with other medications or side effects—many of them turn to the "Nursing Drug Handbook." Making sure this critical information is accurate and clearly presented is the task of nursing and medical publisher Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), a unit of Wolters Kluwer Health, which produces the annual "Nursing Drug Handbook" as well as 4,000 other titles. To streamline the process of publishing the 1,400-page "Nursing2006 Drug Handbook," LWW decided to switch from producing PDF pages using QuarkXPress to an XML-based publishing program. By doing so, LWW

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an in-person, hands-on experience is worth a few thousand, conservatively. This is what I realized while scrutinizing over our "20 New Technology Solutions" roundup (page 20). And this is not a not-so-cleverly disguised promotion for the [fabulous] roundup—in fact, I'm going to point out a teeny bit of a fallacy in it. Many of the products included in the new-technology roundup we discovered while meandering the aisles of industry trade shows. We got the product lowdown from the top dogs at the companies, who man their booths. We saw the products in action, saw