Content and Digital Asset Management

In response to valuable feedback from a variety of educators and publishing experts, online publishing pioneer YUDU Media today released several new and enhanced features on YUDU Education

Farmington Hills, Mich., April 2, 2013 — Gale, part of Cengage Learning and a leading publisher of research and reference resources for libraries, schools and businesses, today announced plans to unify, over the coming years, its extensive digital humanities collections on one state-of-the-art platform, creating the world’s largest online curated primary source and literary collection. The new research experience, Artemis, named for the Greek goddess who symbolizes new ideas, discovery, power and “the hunt,” will enable researchers to make connections and realize relationships among content that has never before been possible.

Berlin, 2 April 2013 – Starting today, the academic publisher De Gruyter will be offering 100 titles from its e-dition series at the crowdfunding platform Unglue.it. Each individual title that raises 2,100 dollars at the site will be made available worldwide as open access content.

Unglue.it is an innovative service provider that is making ebooks free and universally accessible to libraries and book lovers alike. How it works: users contribute an amount of their choosing to the book titles offered at the platform by publishers. If the minimum funding amount is achieved, the publisher will release the book under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND.

The publisher of Khaled Hosseini, Harlan Coben and other popular authors has decided that it's comfortable with letting libraries offer e-book editions of brand new releases.

Starting Tuesday, libraries can offer e-books from Penguin Group (USA) at the same time that the hardcover comes out, a switch from the previous policy of delaying downloads for six months, the publisher told The Associated Press. While vastly more e-books are available to libraries compared with a few years ago, Penguin and other publishers have limited digital access for fear of losing sales.

This webinar explores market transformation across book publishing segments and the benefits of leveraging the latest technologies.

WILMINGTON, DE, March 20, 2013 – The Association of Educational Publishers (AEP), the professional organization for the educational resource industry, is excited to announce the publication of two new resources: The Content Developer’s Guide to the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative and Learning Registry and The Smart Publisher’s Guide to LRMI Tagging. AEP is co-leader of the LRMI, which is working to create and implement a standard tagging specification to improve the online discoverability of learning resources. With contributions from Educational Systemics and inBloom (formerly the Shared Learning Collaborative), the Content Developer’s Guide offers an overview of the ways that metadata and paradata (a specialized type of metadata that can be used to describe how a resource has been used, when, and by whom) are changing the educational landscape, with a specific emphasis on why—and how—to effectively implement the LRMI and participate in the Learning Registry. Additionally, the guide aims to break down the complex pieces that intersect various education metadata initiatives and bring clarity to their respective missions.

For Rick Marazzani, the idea for Ownshelf—a service that allows users to share ebooks across devices and among friends—originated at home. After taking his household completely digital—"no more DVDs, no more CD players, no more books, except for the baby who had board books but likes playing on the iPad"—Marazzani grew frustrated trying to share titles across the various e-readers and tablets his family members possessed.

"I wanted a way to replace the old-fashioned bookshelf," says Marazzani, who comes to the book world via the video game industry. "I wanted something to let you show off what you're reading, see it and interact with it. To grab a book from any device and not have to go through the hassle of DRM."

What big issues do you see publishers thinking and talking about these days?

You can't toss a conference program without hitting someone talking about "discovery," particularly across online platforms. I wish that the conversation was a bit less driven by talk of metadata (although that matters a lot). Institutions like libraries play a critical role in discovering books, but they have been largely shut out of the digital conversation. That needs to change.

February 14, 2013 – Ghent, Belgium – HP Indigo owners at Dscoop8 in Nashville, Feb. 21-23, can see, first-hand, the quick turn-around and quality benefits that HP SmartStream Solution Partner Enfocus delivers in its Switch automation and PitStop preflight and optimization products. Enfocus representatives will demonstrate the integrated HP Indigo and Enfocus solutions in Dscoop8 exhibit #819.

“Software that helps print shops realize the promise of such powerful and finely tuned digital print systems is in great demand among HP Indigo sites,” says Alex Hamilton, Director of Business Development at Enfocus.

Three independent bookstores have filed a class action suit against Amazon and all of the big-six publishers, alleging that the proprietary digital rights management tools Amazon uses on ebooks serve to create a monopoly. The indies say publisher contracts calling for the use of this DRM, which like most forms of DRM prohibits readers from copying ebooks or reading them on non-authorized devices, restrain ebook sales and that Amazon “has unlawfully monopolized or attempted to monopolize the market for ebooks in the United States.”