Content and Digital Asset Management

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Macmillan has acquired cookbook and recipe Web site Cookstr. Founded in 2008 by Katie Workman and Will Schwalbe, Cookstr has reached as many as eight million unique visitors a month via its own consumer-facing recipe web site, as well as powering recipe searches in partnership with other organizations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Schwalbe, formerly senior v-p and editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books, and at William Morrow and Company, will stay on to lead Cookstr, as well as assuming the additional role of v-p of editorial development and content innovation for Macmillan.

Digital publishing is now a mature, thriving industry, and yet many still insist that publishing is in its death throes. Book publishers know better: While hardcover sales declined slightly between 2008 and 2012 (from $5.2 billion to $5 billion), eBook sales grew at an astonishing clip during that period, rising from $64 million to $3 billion. And while digital publications are typically sold at a lower per-unit cost, profit margins are much higher - from 41 percent to 75 percent as publishers make the transition from print to digital.

A new year means a new batch of copyrights expire, and works like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Bell Jar become as free to use as Charles Dickens or Shakespeare. Unless you happen to live in the United States, that is.

As Duke University notes in its mournful annual report, no books will enter the public domain this year, or next year, or the year after that.  This situation is the result of Congress's decision to add another 20 years of protection for long dead authors, which means that no new works will become public until 2019.

Publishers from Bloomsbury, Faber, Penguin Press, and more choose their books of the year, and the ones that got away.

The book that made my year: Many years ago, I was sitting in Blake's bar in Enniskillen with John McGahern and he recommended an American novel from the 60s, written by John Williams: a book called Stoner. I thought it was astonishing, and I passed it to vintage, who brought it out in 2003 with John's introduction.

This year is the year I fell head over heels for audiobooks. There's no way I won't always think of this year that way. It's the year I spent seven and a half hours on the road to and from work each week listening to other people read to me in my car. And when that stopped being enough, I squirreled away extra minutes listening while knitting, doing yard work, restoring old furniture, shopping for groceries, riding my bike.

Why do we continue trying to mimic the print version when that same content is presented digitally? Why do app developers marvel at how good a job they've done simulating the print experience on-screen? We still live in a world where animated page-flips are a basic feature for many popular content consumption apps and services. Are we really that simple-minded that we can't figure out new user interfaces and ways to navigate content? I'm reminded of this terrific parody of how hard it was to move from scrolls to books.

Last year, I made a pledge: that, for 2013, I would put my money where my mouth was on the DRM issue and spend no money on books which were restricted with digital rights management. Why did I make this stand? I think that I had one too many books get lost to stores going out of business, to reader software dropping support for formats which once were commonplace but are no more, to spotty internet service which prevented me from 'validating' a book I had paid good money for and so on.

One of the key issues raised by the head of the US Copyright Office, Maria Pallante, was that it was time to perhaps rethink our current copyright term of life plus 70 and lower it. There had even been some indications that even the maximalists at the MPAA and RIAA were actually (for the first time) open to the idea in her proposal to officially roll back the term to life plus 50 with the ability to "renew" for that last 20 years.

Product development today requires a much more nimble approach, one where customers not only see but also provide detailed feedback long before the product is considered final. In fact, products often need to change so rapidly, based on customer demand, that there never really is a "final" stage.