Content and Digital Asset Management
October 30, 2012
Publishing Perspectives has a guest post discussing BookShout, a startup that currently works in conjunction with three of the Big Six publishers, plus Wiley, to allow importation of your Amazon and Barnes & Noble e-book purchases into its own e-reader apps. It does this by you giving it your Amazon and Barnes & Noble log-in IDs and passwords.
I first saw this mentioned a couple of weeks ago on FutureBook, where Baldur Bjarnason pointed out what a “phenomenally bad idea” this is:
October 25, 2012
Last week we carried a story about a claim that Random House was going to let libraries “own” its e-books. However, it turns out that “own” may have been an optimistic oversimplification. Peter Brantley, Director of the Bookserver Project at the Internet Archive, writes at Publishers Weekly that he’s had some follow-up discussion with Skip Dye, Random House’s VP of Library and Academic Sales, to get clarification on exactly what “own” meant in that context. (Found via TechDirt.)
October 24, 2012
We're rapidly approaching the time in which perpetual copyright hits its existing statutory limits -- so I've fully been expecting an increase in arguments for why copyright needs to be extended again. Of course, the actual economic evidence doesn't support this at all. Instead, the evidence suggests there's tremendous value in a broader public domain. So how will maximalists argue for copyright extension? If a recent paper from economist Stan Liebowitz is any indication, it will be through strawmen and the argument that we should ignore the economics. Seriously.
October 23, 2012
Impelsys, a global leader in providing electronic content delivery solutions, is powering the innovative new Bowker(R) "Book as an Android App," with its award-winning iPublishCentral software platform.
"Book as an Android App" allows authors and small publishers to use Bowker's popular
to create Android-compatible eBook apps from any PDF or ePub document, opening new sales channels such as Google Play and the Amazon App Store.
"We've partnered with Bowker to make available to their customers a simple option for creating their own eBook app, which helps authors and small publishers better market their titles to potential readers," said Sameer Shariff, founder and CEO of Impelsys.
October 23, 2012
The story of the Norwegian customer who had here entire collection of books on her Kindle wiped carries on:
An Amazon Kindle user has had her account wiped and all her paid-for books deleted by Amazon without warning or explanation. She was informed by a customer relations executive that her account had been closed, all open orders had been cancelled and all her content had been removed, but has been unable to find out why.
Doctorow is quite right that what we’re talking about here is the territorial rights to a book.
October 22, 2012
What if Amazon wiped out all your Kindle books and refused to let you open another account? I don’t know what if any sins a customer committed, but such an Orwellian scenario is said to have actually happened. No, I’m not just talking about the remote deletion of 1984, but rather the mysterious zapping of the customer’s entire Kindle library.
The most likely scenario here, as guessed at by BoingBoing, is that the Norwegian customer simply lived outside of the territories for authorized purchases.
October 18, 2012
Posted in: ebook, library Tags: ALA, American Library Association, Big Six publishers, library ebooks, Library Journal, Michael Kelley, Random House, Skip Dye 0 Hear that? That’s the collective sound of a thousand publishing industry jaws hitting...
October 17, 2012
Just as ebooks have turned book publishing on its head, so is a new breed of rich media reading devices changing the ebook paradigm. Publishers who delver their ebooks through dedicated reading apps on iPads, Kindle Fires, Nook Tablets and platforms such as Impelsys, Inkling, MAZ and Copia, are privy to volumes of data on how their customers consume their content, from basic information such as how many pages they've read to more granular info such as, "Was this test-preparation chapter effective."
October 17, 2012
Amazon.com announced an initiative on Wednesday to get its Kindle e-readers and tablet computers into schools, entering a market that has been particularly successful for rival Apple and its iPad device.
Amazon said it has been testing Kindles in recent years with hundreds of kindergarten through 12th grade schools in the United States, selling the devices at bulk discounts and helping them purchase and distribute e-books to students.
October 17, 2012
Amazon has introduced a new service called Whispercast that will help organizations take better control of content on large numbers of Kindles, the company announced today.
Ideally, Whispercast will give schools and other organizations a single touch point for buying and distributing e-books, PDFs, and more to students and employees with Kindles. Whispercast also works with the Kindle apps for iOS, Android, PCs, and Macs.
