Web Development

Game designer Mike Selinker had a dream back in 1995—to bring his puzzle solving fantasy adventure, a book called The Maze of Games, to market.

No one he knew thought he could sell it, so Selinker put his manuscript in the proverbial drawer for eighteen years. Then he decided to try Kickstarter.

Four and half hours after his campaign launched, he met his campaign goal of $16,000, and to date has attracted 1,600 backers and raised more than $100,000.

O wonder! How many goodly books are there here! How beauteous publishing is! I attended the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference this past Tuesday and learned  about a topic that captivates me: new forms that books are able to take when they are conceived as ebooks. There is so much creative work being done in this area that I often want to hold it up to show those who think we are an industry in turmoil. An industry in transition, yes, but with many bright minds at work moving us in exciting new directions.

It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced today its plans to publish, in the summer of 2013, a new memoir by the legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans, and to republish his unforgettable autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture. The books will be published both in print and in an innovative digital multimedia edition—the first of its kind—including rare and previously unreleased visual and audio material. The deal was negotiated by Calvert Morgan, publisher of It Books, and Helen Breitwieser of Cornerstone Literary Agency.

We here at Publishing Business Today are fairly transfixed by today's confluence of the presidential inauguration and the observance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. We get a little choked up about democracy and civil rights, so the whole thing has got us a little verklempt. In the spirit of the day, we direct you to the King Center's extensive bibliography on Dr. King, Civil Rights and Nonviolence.

The world of ed-tech is ramping up another notch, and getting a lot more open in the process: educational publishing giant Elsevier is in advanced talks to buy Mendeley, a London/New York-based provider of a platform for academics to share research and collaborate with each other via a social network. TechCrunch understands from sources close to the companies that the deal is underway and should close this quarter, possibly by the end of February — all things being equal — and will be in the region of $100 million.

This article will appear in the January issue of Book Business.

Mark Z. Danielewski, the author of mind-bending, paradigm-busting works House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, has made a career of turning the novel on its head. So it should come as no surprise that he’s attempting the same with ebooks.

The digital version of the Los Angeles-based author’s The Fifty Year Sword (Pantheon)—which in print features elaborate stitched illustrations—came out late last year and is neither a print replica nor a reflowable document. Rather, the fixed-layout epub takes the fastidiously constructed ghost story for grownups to another level, incorporating an original score and a collection of text effects that are triggered as the reader turns pages .

Digital publisher Safari Books Online has purchased PubFactory’s Electronic Platform for an undisclosed amount.

Effective since December 31, 2012, the sale makes it the owner of this proprietary software solution, which helps publishers develop scalable and semantically-rich electronic libraries.

If you thought global atlas apps began and ended with Google Earth, now there's Atlas by Collins. Drawing on the HarperCollins UK imprint's rich history in map publishing, Atlas by Collins takes a different approach to geographic exploration. While not as granular as Google Earth and its grainy, stitched-together satellite images, Atlas by Collins focuses on beautiful, well-organized globes, all with full swipe and zoom functionality and arranged under three thematic headings: atlas essentials, people and power, and living earth.

 Ryan "Dinosaur Comics" North writes in with the improbable tale of his amazingly successful Kickstarter for a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style adaptation of Hamlet, which has made him a fortune and prompted him to release the whole thing under a Creative Commons license:

    There's a little under two days left on the project for my chooseable-path version of Hamlet called To Be Or Not To Be. You can play as Ophelia, Hamlet, or Hamlet's Dad, but if you choose him you die on the first page and play as a ghost.

For the past two years, higher education publishing professionals have gathered for Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing, a half-day conference exploring the migration from print to digital in higher education publishing. In addition to featuring new results from BISG's ongoing Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education survey, the 2013 program will provide an array of data-rich presentations offering new insights into the unfolding digital transformation.