Content and Digital Asset Management

In the two months since launching the first female-focused mobile phone entertainment application, Harlequin Enterprises Ltd., the Toronto-based publisher best-known for its romance and women’s fiction, says it’s seeing success with its first foray into wireless content. Partnering up with Vocel, a San Diego-based publisher of applications for mobile phones and other wireless devices, Harlequin began offering its mass-market stories to download at the end of April. So far, subscribers have paid $2.49 a month to receive a serialized chapter-a-day of three new stories delivered to their phones or PDAs. “We are very excited about the initial response to Harlequin On The Go,” says

Google’s controversial campaign to scan and digitalize library collections for online viewing on its Internet search engine continues to raise objections and claims of piracy from the publishing world. According to the Agence France-Presse news agency, another publishing group--this time French publisher La Martiniere--filed suit Tuesday against the Internet giant for indexing the company’s titles without first obtaining permission. La Martiniere, owner of France’s Le Seuil, Switzerland’s Delachaux and Niestle, and the United States’ Harry N. Abrams, contends that even if the company is only showing portions of a work online, it still constitutes an infringement of copyright. More than 100 La Martiniere books have

Content is still king in book publishing. The challenge to publishers today is to move, manage, exchange and manipulate that content in the most efficient and profitable ways. In the age of new media, publishers must be able to accept content from external sources, traffic it through all the pre-publishing phases and then be agile in the way they output it, so that it’s cost-effective but also meaningful to readers. As with any new technology, publishers should evaluate software solutions with these basic considerations in mind: Functionality: What solutions out there have the types of capabilities your company needs? Once the field has

For Roger Hall, determining how to extend a successful print publishing business online is no academic exercise. Hall, the senior vice president of scholarly book and journal publisher Haworth Press, has overseen the expansion of the company’s operations from a handful of publications to more than 100 books and 226 quarterly journals. Hall says Haworth succeeds because the company identifies social, behavioral and library science niches, among others, and uses a flexible printing strategy to extract the maximum return from small print runs. “You don’t need to have 20,000 subscribers to a journal to make a profitable business,” Hall says. “Four hundred to 600

The understanding of metadata needs to be expanded. Perhaps your work brings you in contact with a part of the metadata chain, but the true value of metadata is better understood from a bird’s-eye view.

The importance of metadata goes beyond books and magazines. It's increasingly essential to all media: print, ebooks, images, videos--it's what makes it all work together.

"We are involved in the world of the book as an art object—the 'artist's book'." From this perch, director Steve Woodall foresees profound changes in publishing involving the comingling of books, art, and technology.

What makes the Book Business Buyer's Guide different from other buyer's guides out there is that it provides a great deal of editorial context for the technology listings. From "The Nut's & Bolts of Ebooks & Apps" to "The Ecommerce Imperative" we hope to provide perspective on how these technologies fit into the greater business strategy.

Although digital tech has been transforming the book industry since the CD-ROM hit the scene, publishers have yet to master digital books the way they have printed pages. Because the digital book form continues to evolve, publishers are in a perpetual state of experimentation, testing out app products or introducing interactivity into their ebooks. The industry is still discovering which digital products resonate and how best to produce them.