Web Development

The Web corrects falsehoods as efficiently as it creates them. Rumors have always spread like wildfire during a crisis; it's easier today than ever before to have them debunked. It's also easy to let even the worst tragedies dim in our consciousness as new stories come down the 24-hour news pipeline.

We hear a lot of stories here about how this or that ebook is going to fundamentally change the ebook. And to varying degrees these books do and don't tweak the paradigm, so we take such news with a grain of salt.

But when Mark Z. Danielewski reinvents the ebook, we take notice. On Slate's Future Tense blog, Kim O'Connor reports that the author's new The Fifty Year Sword is "a key project in [Pantheon's] strategic development plan and a category changer in the realm of digitized adult fiction."

Color us intrigued.

—Brian Howard

Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company, today announced an agreement with Twin Sisters Productions, a leader in children’s educational books and music, to offer a selection of their musical and non-fiction books on Storia®, the teacher-recommended eReading app for kids. A collection of books from Twin Sisters will be available on Storia, through Scholastic Book Clubs and Scholastic Book Fairs beginning in Spring 2013. Available for free download on PC, iPad and select Android tablets (with more platforms to come later this year), the Storia eReading app, is specially designed to captivate kids while helping them become better readers. Storia offers thousands of titles for kids from toddlers through teens with more content being added weekly. Storia was recognized by Warren Buckleitner with the “Editor’s Choice Award” for children’s eBook apps and most recently was named one of the “Top 10 Best High-Tech Toys” of 2012 and one of the “Top 100 Best Toys” of 2012 by Dr. Toy.

A new study by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) puts a twist on the conventional wisdom about ebook consumers, e-readers and tablets. Released today, the study reveals that dedicated e-readers (such as the e-ink Kindle and Nook devices) are losing ground to tablet devices (particularly the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet) as the preferred e-reading device of ebook consumers.

Fast Company has an article and video today on Polish art student Waldek Węgrzyn's ebook/pbook hybrid, an El Lissitzky-inspired project for his masters degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Węgrzyn's project, a more or less hardwired physical book that interacts with a digital interface as it's read, is beyond mesmerizing. Plus, we give high marks to any and all El Lissitzky references. —Brian Howard

From the article: "The concept is as obvious as it is radical: instead of making readers choose between physical and digital, why not give them the best of both?"

Macmillan Education said Monday it will cease publishing a print edition of its dictionaries, following other publications into an online-only format as print sales decline.
Final editions of the dictionaries are now being printed.
Macmillan Education, a unit of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., said it will focus on its expanding digital resources, including an English language dictionary and thesaurus, a column on emerging words and Open Dictionary, which allows users to submit new words and slang such as Frankenstorm.

As publishers become increasingly digital, both in workflow and product offering, we will continue to hear more and more about the agile publishing model. Agile is a methodology that comes from the software development industry. Its main components are iterative design, rapid prototyping, minimum viable product (MVP), customer feedback loops which provide behavioral and usage analytics and data-driven decision making.

Essentially, the objective of agile is to push things to market more quickly, and to learn from actual usage patterns. The data collected informs subsequent product releases. While this model has yet to be fully realized or articulated in the publishing space, there are components of it which have been the subject of experimentation among publishers. If your company is just starting in agile or is in the midst of implementing an agile workflow, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Here's your strategy landmine for the day: The web browser is dying off. It may be difficult to fathom, but in a few years, no program we use on our tablets, phones or computers will resemble the web browsers we're using today. Digital services, social platforms and most importantly, digital content are all steadily migrating away from the web browser and into the world of apps.

Oceanhouse Media's "Record and Share" functionality, Oxford University Press' "How Good Is Your English?" and Zondervan's "The Beginner's Bible."

Random House is letting consumers browse recipes and learn to make simple meals from food writer Nigella Lawson via a new iPad application.

The company partnered with AKQA on the mobile initiative. The effort aims to bring exclusive new features and reward recipes to Nigella’s fans in the digital iPad space.

“It’s a continuation of the strategy which began with the original Nigella Quick Collection app to bring Nigella to a new digital audience,” said Jon Salt, head of digital product development at Random House Group Digital.