Technology

Mastering Change in Book Publishing
August 3, 2016 at 2:34 pm

Change has always been a constant in the publishing business, and of course change is a natural state in all of our lives. What’s different today is that change is occurring faster than it ever has before. Carolyn Pittis, director of Welman Digital, pointed out at the Yale Publishing Course on Monday, that the Agricultural…

Amazon Extends Its Dominance with Audible Channels
July 11, 2016 at 11:32 am

Even though they’re gaining momentum I’ve never been a big fan of audiobooks. Amazon, of course, owns the market with both Audible and Brilliance. Although it didn’t receive a lot fanfare last week, Audible introduced one of the most interesting and long overdue services that I’ve seen in a long time. I’m talking about Audible…

Litsy App Brings Bookish Conversations to Life Online
July 5, 2016 at 12:19 pm

Litsy is a social community app that some have described as the “Instagram” of the book world. The goal of the iOS app is to fuel book-related conversations through visual, 300-character posts which users tag to a specific book. Litsy users can follow their favorite authors, share book quotes, and more easily discover their next…

How Do We Know When Technology Helps—or Hurts—the Classroom? Educators at ISTE Weigh In
June 30, 2016 at 1:22 pm

“We dropped over $10,000 last year on a math product, but I’m not sure if it’s really helped our students learn.” Sound familiar? Over the past few years, “efficacy” has entered the edtech lexicon as a word commonly used to reference whether or not edtech is driving student learning. But as educators and edtech companies…

HMH & Pearson Dive into Virtual Reality Curriculum with Google Expeditions
June 30, 2016 at 12:02 pm

This week both Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson announced partnerships with Google Expeditions, a program that allows teachers to take their students on virtual field trips using Google Cardboard. Since Google Expeditions launched in September 2015, over one million students from 11 different countries have taken virtual field trips. Now both HMH and Pearson are…

Intellogo Brings Machine Learning to Book Recommendations
June 29, 2016 at 2:05 pm

While the technology industry is abuzz with new opportunities created by advances in artificial intelligence -- from intelligent web search to voice recognition -- book publishing has yet to feel the full impact of AI. Neil Balthaser intends to change that through his machine learning software Intellogo. Intellogo uses technology that can analyze and understand…

How Publishers Can Protect Their Data & the Privacy of Their Customers
June 15, 2016 at 12:51 pm

In the “data wars” being fought today, hackers are targeting computer systems and individuals’ accounts, meaning that consumers are often their top targets and victims. But that does not mean that businesses are immune -- far from it. Businesses are composed of people and the most valuable data, and the richest targets available, relate to…

Let’s Take “Search Inside the Book” to a Whole New Level
June 6, 2016 at 9:22 am

Do you remember when Amazon introduced both “Look Inside” and “Search Inside” functionality for books? They were such simple yet revolutionary features at the time. Before Look/Search Inside it was impossible to do a simple flip test like you could at a brick-and-mortar store. Fast-forward to today where we take Look/Search Inside features for granted,…

The Future of Ebook Annotations Is Near & the Possibilities Are Endless
May 13, 2016 at 2:42 pm

“The typical experience with digital books these days is pretty terrible,” said Dan Whaley, CEO of Hypothes.is, during the opening remarks of an IDPF DigiCon session on Wednesday. “We can read books on a Kindle, tablet, and online and that’s great, but our ability to collaborate with other people while doing that is essentially nonexistent.”…

LinkedIn’s Sean Callahan On The Power of Data to Transform Book Publishing
May 12, 2016 at 1:56 pm

Thanks to the rapid increase in computer processing speeds over the past decade, data has become easier to analyze and more available than ever before, and it’s changing the way we do business, said Sean Callahan, author of The Big Data-Driven Business and senior manager of content marketing at LinkedIn. Callahan led one of the…