Technology

At the age of 50, Park established his company Gitden in a rundown office in the Sadang neighborhood of Seoul and produced the Gitden Reader after two years during which he barely left his desk. The application has shoved aside products by Apple, Google, and Amazon to gain recognition for its world-class quality.

The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which maintains the electronic publication (EPUB) standard for e-books, published on May 12 the results of its assessment of the compatibility of e-book readers on app stores to the EPUB 3.0 standards.

Across the globe, 3.4 million people die each year from water-related diseases. The statistic is particularly staggering considering that many people at risk of such preventable deaths have no idea that the water they imbibe is contaminated. To educate people about the need to filter water, and to provide the tool to do so, WATERisLIFE teamed up with researchers from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Virginia to develop the Drinkable Book.

Is the future an interactive novel read on a Google Glass? One thing's for certain: the transformation of the written word is one of the defining issues of our age.

How many e-book consumers realise that some publishers, writers and distributors know an awful lot about their reading style? They have knowledge about how far into the book you've reached, when you get bored, which characters you like and those you don't. Amazon, Apple and Google, along with countless large publishers, embrace the idea of providing products that readers are apparently craving.

The days of purely teaching students through text books is something that should be found in a history book, or more likely, an online history course or app. The tried-and-true, and ancient, method of teaching through books alone has been forever changed by technology. McGraw-Hill Education has been investing a lot of time, money and research into the 21st Century classroom and is releasing new educational video games that introduce new ways for kids of all ages to learn everything from politics to Spanish.

I was thinking the other day that in all our diligent argumentation over open access (OA) and related matters, we may have neglected to notice the multiple infrastructure layers that have emerged to form a new basis of infrastructure for scholarly publishing. From the late 1990s until now, there have been significant changes in how scholarly publishing is accomplished. These sustaining technologies have been adopted without much argument or fanfare, and their significance might be underestimated.

Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader published a blog Tuesday hyping a U.K.-based survey that bears good news for ebook lovers. According to UK reading charity Booktrust, ebook adoption is at 29% among respondents. Good news, right? Perhaps, but in light of a more worrisome number, I'm less ecstatic.

Publishers Bruce Shaw and Adam Salomone of Harvard Common Press invest in food tech startups and have built a new business model along the way.

Amazon's strategy with its Kindle e-readers and tablets has always been pretty clear: bring in more customers, even at a loss, so long as they partake of the online retailer's panoply of services, from e-books to streaming movies. Unlike rival Apple, which sells its devices at a premium, Amazon has seemed more or less happy to break even or lose money on its devices. Now, a report based on research by Consumer Intelligent Research Partners (CIRP) shows how shrewd that strategy may be.

Diana Dawson has over the years bought her twin children digital cameras, e-book readers and media players as Christmas presents. This holiday season, she's covering those bases with one device: a tablet computer.

"They do it all," Dawson said outside an Apple Inc. store in Walnut Creek, California, after buying iPads for her now 27-year-old daughters.

Dawson’s purchasing underscores the changes roiling the consumer-electronics market. While the industry once benefited from year-end sales in categories from cameras to printers to desktop personal computers, this holiday period brings the clearest signs yet that

At our Publishing Business Conference & Expo in September, one very popular session was called "The Futurist Panel." Convened and organized by the visionary Brett Sandusky, it included a number of forward-thinking and innovative publishing folks, encouraged publishers to think more like software designers and less like, well, publishers, and debated the future of publishing as a craft and the core strengths publishers need to develop to compete in the publishing landscape of tomorrow.