Content and Digital Asset Management
October 16, 2012
Look at the publishing news these days and you'll read as much about devices as you do about books. There are new families of Kindles, Kobos and Nooks on the block; Google's Nexus 7 is outselling the Kindle Fire; Microsoft is betting big on its Surface tablet; oh, and maybe you've heard about an iPad mini coming 'round the bend? And let's not even get into the wild world of smartphones. Point is, while the printed book was once a platform unto itself, now the ways people read "books," and the devices they read on, are expanding.
October 16, 2012
Apress, a leading publisher of technology books, announces the launch of ApressOpen, a program that offers technology companies and professionals the opportunity to publish technical and business content under an open access model. With ApressOpen, content will be freely available through multiple online distribution channels and electronic formats with the goal of disseminating professionally edited and technically reviewed content to the worldwide community.
October 15, 2012
Textbook publisher Pearson set off an unfortunate chain of events with a takedown notice issued aimed at a copy of Beck's Hoplessness Scale posted by a teacher on one of Edublogs' websites (You may recall Pearson from such other related copyright nonsense as The $180 Art Book With No Pictures and No Free Textbooks Ever!). The end result? Nearly 1.5 million teacher and student blogs taken offline by Edublogs' host, ServerBeach. James Farmer at wpmu.org fills in the details.
October 12, 2012
To meet the expectations of readers in a print and digital world, Workman Publishing is expanding its relationship with Ingram, selecting CoreSource services for the management and distribution of digital content.
October 10, 2012
National writers’ organizations representing authors of books in a variety of genres believe a secret deal between Google and major book publishers may encourage Google to digitize, use, and sell copyrighted books illegally. The writers groups ask the Department of Justice to review whether the terms of the secret deal may violate Federal antitrust law.
Google and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) announced October 4 that they had signed a settlement agreement that means the publishers no longer are litigants in an ongoing suit against Google for copyright violations.
October 5, 2012
Publishers of ebooks have a dilemma: You want readers to find (and purchase) your products. But you don't want pirates making your products available for free. But is digital rights management (DRM) technology, one method publishers use (with questionable success) to combat piracy, a hindrance or even antithetical to content discovery?
October 4, 2012
Five large publishers have made a separate peace with Google over the inclusion of their books in Google Books, announcing a settlement that resolves the seven-year-old litigation with the search giant.
Google had been fighting a two-front war over its Google Books program. In addition to its dispute with the publishers, it is also defending a lawsuit by the Author's Guild, which is seeking to head a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the nation's authors.
October 3, 2012
A few weeks ago, crowdfunding platform Unglue.it announced the release of its first ebook: “Oral Literature in Africa” via the U.K.’s Open Book Publishers. Its return to “print” after more than a decade is cause for celebration. More good books in the public domain is a good thing. This is the raison d’etre of Unglue.it, a small company that seeks to reward rights holders who make their works available as ebooks under creative commons licenses and without DRM.
September 28, 2012
California Governor Jerry Brown gave his pen a workout yesterday. In addition to signing legislation prohibiting social network snooping by employers and colleges, he also signed off on a proposal for the state to fund 50 open source digital textbooks. He signed two bills, one to create the textbooks and the other to establish a California Digital Open Source Library to host them, at a meeting with students in Sacramento.
September 28, 2012
Techdirt writes a lot about the problems with DRM, and how inefficient and inconvenient it is. But for millions of visually-impaired people, those "inconveniences" represent something much deeper, and much worse. Somebody who has started writing eloquently about this issue is Rupert Goodwins. He is one of the UK's most respected technology journalists and also, sadly, is losing his sight. As he points out in a powerful new piece, things ought to be getting better for the visually impaired in the Internet age:
