Technology Review

Most neighborhoods in America have a public library. Now the biggest neighborhood in America, the Internet, wants a library of its own. Last week, Ars attended a conference held by the Digital Public Library of America, a nascent group of intellectuals hoping to put all of America's library holdings online. The DPLA is still in its infancy — there's no official staff, nor is there a finished website where you can access all the books they imagine will be accessible. But if the small handful of volunteers and directors have their way, you'll see all that by April 2013

iStoryTime, the library of children’s book apps, announced that many of its top selling storybook apps are now available on the NOOK Color Tablet.

The year is 1603, and you are in Elizabethan London. When you receive an invitation from an old acquaintance, you expect nothing but an entertaining evening with good food and drink. Instead, you find yourself plunged into a conspiracy of black magic involving some of the most powerful and important men in London. Will you thwart this conspiracy before it brings down the entire city? That’s up to you in “The King of Shreds and Patches,” a new interactive fiction game for Kindle.

E-books seem to be increasingly an investment of choice. This week, a venture capital firm has invested $2 million in Zuuka Group's iStoryTime.

For Roger Hall, determining how to extend a successful print publishing business online is no academic exercise. Hall, the senior vice president of scholarly book and journal publisher Haworth Press, has overseen the expansion of the company’s operations from a handful of publications to more than 100 books and 226 quarterly journals. Hall says Haworth succeeds because the company identifies social, behavioral and library science niches, among others, and uses a flexible printing strategy to extract the maximum return from small print runs. “You don’t need to have 20,000 subscribers to a journal to make a profitable business,” Hall says. “Four hundred to 600

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