Content and Digital Asset Management

Less than a year after big-six publisher Penguin stopped making its ebooks and digital audiobooks available to libraries, the company is distributing them again through new partners. Penguin, which is already working with digital library distributor 3M Cloud Library to make some ebooks available to libraries, has now expanded a pilot program with 3M competitor Baker & Taylor Axis360. The Baker & Taylor partnership will include libraries in Los Angeles and Cleveland, the New York Times reports.

Columbus, OH, November 15, 2012 – DataCurate announces the publication of The Metadata Handbook, a one-stop guide for book publishers — large, small, and independent — offering help in understanding how metadata works and outlining the essential components of successful metadata creation and distribution.

Topics covered include:

• How metadata for books operates in the real world
• Metadata fundamentals & the history of metadata for books
• Standards and best practices for creating and distributing accurate and comprehensive metadata
• The basics of ONIX for Books, including ONIX 3.0
• The basics of EPUB 3 metadata options
• The latest metadata trends, including metadata for self-publishers.

November 16, 2012 – Hachette  Digital today announced the launch of Hachette Book Group’s EPUB3 program.  Hachette Digital is committed to the EPUB3 format, which allows greater flexibility in representing enhanced content, including interactive covers,

It was about five years ago that we first wrote about best selling author Paulo Coelho revealing that he was eagerly helping create pirate foreign translations of his books, and noting that sales of legitimate copies always seemed to increase whenever he...

For authors, one of the risks of doing promotional events is sitting at a table stacked high with books and reading to an empty room. Even in this era of social media, getting out into the meatspace to build an audience is vital for authors. But not only is it demoralizing when the book you've poured your passion into is met with a shrug (or worse), it's a big waste of time—time that could have been spent, say, promoting a more successful event.

What's an author to do? Andrew Kessler—entrepreneur and author of "Martian Summer," his first-hand account of shadowing NASA's 2009 Phoenix Mars Lander mission—thinks he has an answer.

As publishers become increasingly digital, both in workflow and product offering, we will continue to hear more and more about the agile publishing model. Agile is a methodology that comes from the software development industry. Its main components are iterative design, rapid prototyping, minimum viable product (MVP), customer feedback loops which provide behavioral and usage analytics and data-driven decision making.

Essentially, the objective of agile is to push things to market more quickly, and to learn from actual usage patterns. The data collected informs subsequent product releases. While this model has yet to be fully realized or articulated in the publishing space, there are components of it which have been the subject of experimentation among publishers. If your company is just starting in agile or is in the midst of implementing an agile workflow, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

When publishing teams wax enthusiastic about their vision for digital media and technology, director

Here's your strategy landmine for the day: The web browser is dying off. It may be difficult to fathom, but in a few years, no program we use on our tablets, phones or computers will resemble the web browsers we're using today. Digital services, social platforms and most importantly, digital content are all steadily migrating away from the web browser and into the world of apps.

Piracy—the illegal downloading and/or distribution of copyrighted works, not swashbuckling on the high seas—is a sticky wicket indeed. With the advent of the Internet and other digital technologies, online piracy has grown into a significant concern for all types of copyright owners, including publishers. There can be no doubt that content piracy costs publishers and other rights holders large amounts of revenue. But exactly how much revenue is being lost is a point of contention. It can be challenging to determine how much publishers should focus on the piracy of their publications and articles and whether, if they go too far trying to protect themselves, they run the risk of alienating some of their best customers.

One reason some consumers haven’t jumped on the ebook bandwagon is because they’re concerned the format they select might become obsolete in a few years. Others dismiss that as unfounded pessimism but I have an example of how it can happen, and not with some fly-by-night platform. This problem happened on Apple’s extremely popular iOS platform.

Here’s a link to a problem one of our customers recently reported about our iOS ebook apps.