Adam Penenberg

Culling through recent publishing news, two stories were of particular interest to us here in the Publishing Business Group. The first is about Seattle becoming a mecca for publishing. Hey, we knew that! We reported on Seattle's thriving publishing community in the June Book Business. See our story here and read Emily Parkhurst's interesting article here. We've also loved a recent piece by Adam Penenberg, a keynote speaker at the upcoming Publishing Business Conference & Expo.

PressBooks founder Hugh McGuire refers to his company as “the indie rock band of ebooks startups,” which is why, unless you’ve been watching PandoDaily really closely, you wouldn’t have seen much of it in the media.

Today, just like an indie band that relies on its fan base for its survival, two-year-old PressBooks has announced that it is making its free book publishing software open source. McGuire, a Montreal-based entrepreneur who also founded crowdsourced audiobooks publisher Librivox, hopes that third-party developers can help PressBooks expand the meaning and utility of ebooks.

Could Apple’s app store/iBooks store submission rules be stifling creativity in e-books? That’s the question posed by a FastCompany article by Adam Penenberg looking at a couple of interactive children’s books that the husband-and-wife team of Ellen Jacob and Kirk Cheyfitz have created for the iPad. Jacob and Cheyfitz take the approach that, while reading [...]

Remember that report about how rife with plagiarized and duplicate books Amazon’s self-published titles are? Its author, Adam Penenberg, has written a follow-up article for Fast Company in which he tracked down one of the plagiarists to find out more about how and why he had published the title. The plagiarist is a Kuwaiti national [...]

As students of Gothic literature and Keanu Reeves fans know, Bram Stoker's Dracula is that rare classic that offers a high-brow cover for what is essentially a sex romp through Transylvania. As author Maria Cruz found, it also makes for good plagiarizing.

You see, when Amazon opened up its Kindle Select program to indie publishers and self-published authors, it left the door ajar for plagiarists. As Adam Penenberg points out in Fast Company, that problem is particularly rampant in the erotica genre.

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