App Development

8th April 2014 - London - First day of The London Book Fair, and a large crowd gathered at the Tech Theatre for the launch of BookSnacking, a new way for publishers to share previews of ebooks in the browser. This affordable service costs $150 a book and can be delivered within 24 hours.
 
BookSnacking is designed to engage readers quickly. The reading experience emulates that of a bookshop, as readers canread pages or even a chapter before deciding to buy. Both digital and print books can be promoted using BookSnacking.
 
Rather than constantly generating new content for sharing ideas about books, publishers can simply upload their actual books to YUDU who will process and return the live link that can be shared across Social Media.
 
The launch talk was delivered by Richard Stephenson, YUDU CEO: "Book discovery is the greatest challenge that publishers face today. YUDU BookSnacking aims to provide a powerful tool for marketeers."
 
From a readers perspective it's an instant reading experience with no waiting around for books to download. For publishers this speed in a digital world will get their content seen faster.
 
Tiling technology handles even the most complex images with excellent resolution on all screens, including retina screens. Being able to showcase content in this format not only gives publishers the ability to give readers the opportunity to sample content but to also deliver an excellent quality of reading experience which will convert even the most skeptical reader.
 
The main advantage of this format over competing ways of sharing ebook samples is strategic control. Full statistics and data collection opportunities are available and YUDU believe that this will give publishers the background data they need. 

Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won't commit to.

"I give it a few seconds - not even minutes - and then I'm moving again," says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.

But it's not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel.

The days of purely teaching students through text books is something that should be found in a history book, or more likely, an online history course or app. The tried-and-true, and ancient, method of teaching through books alone has been forever changed by technology. McGraw-Hill Education has been investing a lot of time, money and research into the 21st Century classroom and is releasing new educational video games that introduce new ways for kids of all ages to learn everything from politics to Spanish.

Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader published a blog Tuesday hyping a U.K.-based survey that bears good news for ebook lovers. According to UK reading charity Booktrust, ebook adoption is at 29% among respondents. Good news, right? Perhaps, but in light of a more worrisome number, I'm less ecstatic.

Last week the Downtown Library in Palo Alto, Calif. hosted a panel discussion on the industry-wide transformations wrought by digital publishing. The panel, entitled "Sea Change: The ePublishing Transformation," was made up of experts hailing from all corners of the industry. Panelists included sources from Scribd, Smashwords, JukePop.

We're thrilled to announce that Scribd now offers readers over 300,000 book titles through our subscription service! That's right - your personal digital library has now expanded to include 300k+ New York Times bestsellers, literary classics, groundbreaking non-fiction, and more. And with big numbers comes a lot of big, interesting data. So, we designed an infographic to highlight some fun facts about Scribd subscribers and their reading habits.

It would run to over a million pages, featuring more than four million articles by 20 million volunteers: an "record-breaking" new project to turn Wikipedia into 1,000 books has just launched on Indiegogo. Conceived by the team who work on the open source book tool for Wikipedia at publisher PediaPress, the Indiegogo fundraiser is looking to raise $50,000 (£30,000) to bring Wikipedia into print. "We all know that Wikipedia is huge. The English version alone consists of more than four million articles. But can you imagine how large Wikipedia really is?

The rise of self-publishing has already catapulted a few lucky writers to the top of bestseller lists. And major publishing houses often try to woo these stars into their fold. Swoon Reads, a new young adult romance publisher, is taking this dance a step further. It has added crowdsourcing to the mix, promising a contract to the writer whose book wins the hearts of a community of online readers.

On Friday - Valentine's Day - Swoon Reads announced the winner of that contract: Sandra Hall a teen librarian in Morristown, N.J.

As publishing tools have become cheaper and more distributed, many have benefited from this ongoing democratization of distribution - whether it's Twitter users posting newsworthy updates from war zones, or would-be authors publishing their thoughts on Medium. That's the power of a platform that allows anyone to publish. It's when the line blurs between platform and publisher that things start to get tricky, not just for writers but for readers as well.

Amazon's Kindle Worlds, the company's publishing arm for legally-sanctioned fan fiction, is expanding fast. The company announced today that it's adding seven new properties, including GI Joe, Veronica Mars, and the Pretty Little Liars spinoff Ravenswood. That brings the total number of fan fiction franchises available exclusively through Amazon up to 20. The announcement comes on the 50th anniversary of GI Joe, which is owned by Hasbro. "Hasbro now enters a new segment of the business by embracing the concept of open-source storytelling, and officially unlocking the world of GI Joe to our fans through Amazon's Kindle Worlds,"