Web Development

TORONTO, CANADA - June 10, 2014 - Audiobooks.com, the only service that allows members to both stream and download audiobooks, today announced that they are releasing a new Romance Audiobooks, Novels and Stories app for iOS devices. Audiobooks.com extends the Romance Audiobooks app as a first attempt at targeting a niche market based on genre…

Join HarperCollins and Book Business as they discuss: pros and cons of transformation projects, best practices, and lessons learned.

The global education company Pearson has landed a major contract to administer tests aligned to the common-core standards, a project described as being of "unprecedented scale" in the U.S. testing arena by one official who helped negotiate it.

The decision to award the contract, announced Friday, was made by a group of states developing tests linked to the common core for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, one of two main consortia of states creating exams to match the standards.

Hachette UK has formed a new partnership with @RailBookClub to help it engage with readers.

@RailBookClub, advertising company JCDecaux's content-led consumer book club, invites passengers to tweet book recommendations, which are then run on JCDecaux's digital screens at train stations across the country.

The book club "builds communities of readers through a shared passion for books, providing a daily source of inspiration for the rail audience".

8th April 2014 - London - First day of The London Book Fair, and a large crowd gathered at the Tech Theatre for the launch of BookSnacking, a new way for publishers to share previews of ebooks in the browser. This affordable service costs $150 a book and can be delivered within 24 hours.
 
BookSnacking is designed to engage readers quickly. The reading experience emulates that of a bookshop, as readers canread pages or even a chapter before deciding to buy. Both digital and print books can be promoted using BookSnacking.
 
Rather than constantly generating new content for sharing ideas about books, publishers can simply upload their actual books to YUDU who will process and return the live link that can be shared across Social Media.
 
The launch talk was delivered by Richard Stephenson, YUDU CEO: "Book discovery is the greatest challenge that publishers face today. YUDU BookSnacking aims to provide a powerful tool for marketeers."
 
From a readers perspective it's an instant reading experience with no waiting around for books to download. For publishers this speed in a digital world will get their content seen faster.
 
Tiling technology handles even the most complex images with excellent resolution on all screens, including retina screens. Being able to showcase content in this format not only gives publishers the ability to give readers the opportunity to sample content but to also deliver an excellent quality of reading experience which will convert even the most skeptical reader.
 
The main advantage of this format over competing ways of sharing ebook samples is strategic control. Full statistics and data collection opportunities are available and YUDU believe that this will give publishers the background data they need. 

Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won't commit to.

"I give it a few seconds - not even minutes - and then I'm moving again," says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.

But it's not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel.

Digital textbooks continue to be one of the key frustrations in the public education arena. So far, they're not more widely available than print, they're not more cost effective than their paper counterparts, and they're still a one-size-fits-all tool that teachers are required to use without much prior input into which texts will best meet their students' needs in any given year. In short, digital textbooks have yet to live up to the hype that surrounded them as K12 teachers still don't have the advantages that digital can offer.

Last week the Downtown Library in Palo Alto, Calif. hosted a panel discussion on the industry-wide transformations wrought by digital publishing. The panel, entitled "Sea Change: The ePublishing Transformation," was made up of experts hailing from all corners of the industry. Panelists included sources from Scribd, Smashwords, JukePop.

We're thrilled to announce that Scribd now offers readers over 300,000 book titles through our subscription service! That's right - your personal digital library has now expanded to include 300k+ New York Times bestsellers, literary classics, groundbreaking non-fiction, and more. And with big numbers comes a lot of big, interesting data. So, we designed an infographic to highlight some fun facts about Scribd subscribers and their reading habits.

It would run to over a million pages, featuring more than four million articles by 20 million volunteers: an "record-breaking" new project to turn Wikipedia into 1,000 books has just launched on Indiegogo. Conceived by the team who work on the open source book tool for Wikipedia at publisher PediaPress, the Indiegogo fundraiser is looking to raise $50,000 (£30,000) to bring Wikipedia into print. "We all know that Wikipedia is huge. The English version alone consists of more than four million articles. But can you imagine how large Wikipedia really is?