Bill McCoy

Dan Eldridge is a journalist and guidebook author based in Philadelphia's historic Old City district, where he and his partner own and operate Kaya Aerial Yoga, the city's only aerial yoga studio. A longtime cultural reporter, Eldridge also writes about small business and entrepreneurship, travel, and the publishing industry. Follow him on Twitter at @YoungPioneers.

  London based publishing start-up Jellybooks has won £25,000 from the Government-backed Technology Strategy Board to develop user tracking tools for e-books. The prize was awarded this week at IC Tomorrow’s latest digital innovation contest, which this time around was focused on the collection and use of data.

 

A book is a book is a book—is it not?  Not in the hall at the former Church of Christ, Scientist, now turned into the magnificent home of the Internet Archive on Funston Avenue at the edge of the Presidio in San Francisco. The Archive, established in 1996 with the goal of offering permanent access to records that exist in digital format, is the venue for the annual Books in Browsers conference, which took place on October 24th and 25th. This reporter attended this year for the first time, and had her mind blown.

Now that Amazon has announced that it's selling more books in digital form than in print, it's only logical that even the smallest of independent publishing houses are racing to make their entire backlist available as ebooks. Book Business solicited a wide range of advice about the ebook conversion process from digital publishing pros. Here's what they had to say:

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a leading U.S.-based trade association representing the entire book supply chain, announced today the publication of a new Policy Statement endorsing EPUB 3 as the accepted and preferred standard for representing, packaging, and encoding structured and semantically enhanced Web content — including XHTML, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file format. BISG member companies, and other industry stakeholders, can visit http://www.bisg.org/what-we-do-4-155-pol-1201-endorsement-of-epub-3.php to download a copy.

John Scalzi won't have to field any tough questions about how digital rights management software (DRM) works at tonight's book signing. The author—out on tour promoting his newest science fiction novel, "Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas"—says those difficult discussions popped up regularly when he engaged with his tech-savvy fan base in the past. But he doesn't expect any of that negative discourse at tonight's Boston-area signing event—or at any of the other scheduled stops on his current campaign to promote the New York Times bestseller.

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