The Learning Curve

Ellen Harvey is a freelance writer and editor who covers the latest technologies and strategies reshaping the publishing landscape. She previously served as the Senior Editor at Publishing Executive and Book Business.

Change has always been a constant in the publishing business, and of course change is a natural state in all of our lives. What’s different today is that change is occurring faster than it ever has before. Carolyn Pittis, director of Welman Digital, pointed out at the Yale Publishing Course on Monday, that the Agricultural…

What was the pervasive theme of IDPF DigiCon this year? Digital publishing, of course. Data, obviously. But also, libraries. Likely because DigiCon was hosted in Chicago this year, home of the American Library Association, library professionals had a seat on multiple panels throughout the conference and shared their perspectives on issues like book discovery, digital…

“The typical experience with digital books these days is pretty terrible,” said Dan Whaley, CEO of Hypothes.is, during the opening remarks of an IDPF DigiCon session on Wednesday. “We can read books on a Kindle, tablet, and online and that’s great, but our ability to collaborate with other people while doing that is essentially nonexistent.”…

Thanks to the rapid increase in computer processing speeds over the past decade, data has become easier to analyze and more available than ever before, and it’s changing the way we do business, said Sean Callahan, author of The Big Data-Driven Business and senior manager of content marketing at LinkedIn. Callahan led one of the…

Next week I’ll be attending IDPF DigiCon in Chicago on May 10th and 11th. Now boasting a new name and location, DigiCon looks to tackle many challenges within the book industry brought on by rapidly changing technology. Sessions ask forward-looking questions like: How can publishers reimagine the ebook as an open and cross-platform experience? How…

This week Amazon won a contract to provide digital textbooks and other educational materials to the New York City school district. It signifies a major milestone in Amazon’s strategic push into the K-12 market. The three-year contract is worth $30 million and requires Amazon to build a custom ebook marketplace for the NYC school district,…

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