Web Development

Amazon.com is in advanced negotiations to buy the mobile chip business of Texas Instruments, according to Israeli newspaper Calcalist, which would put the online retail giant on the path to becoming a manufacturer of smartphone and tablet processors.

However, the report generated a healthy dose of skepticism among users of Stocktwits.

I know many writers are hesitant to the idea of blogging. It feels like just another social media chore, but nothing can be farther from the truth. In fact, blogging is probably the ONLY form of social media that 1) draws from a writer’s strengths and 2) doesn’t try to fundamentally change our personality.

Yes, as a social media Jedi, I will tell you that it’s a good idea to tweet and learn to use Facebook, but I’m also going to tell you something you already know.

The rush to create large, free online classes has generated anxiety at universities around the country. With finances already tight and with a surge of movement toward online learning, universities are being forced to move quickly to change centuries-old models of learning. Terms like historic, seismic and revolutionary now pop up in descriptions of the challenges that higher education faces in the coming years.

Many institutions have been preparing for these changes for years, building infrastructure and expertise, experimenting and recruiting, and integrating online learning into long-term strategies. 

There is a very good piece on the AAUP Web site about some developments in the university press world concerning so-called short-form publishing. Long-form means book length. Something is short-form when it is longer than an article and less than a book. In fiction we would call this a novella, but we don’t really have a term for this for nonfiction, unless we go back in time and raise the specter and form of the pamphleteers of the 18th century. O Thomas Paine, where art thou?

In an age of instant information access, professional and scholarly publishers have to get smarter when developing products to fit audience workflows. Simply having a large catalogue of titles is no longer enough; from finance to education to STM, users expect information to be tailored to their day-to-day needs and priorities. Meeting these requirements can spell the difference between a successful product and a dud.

It doesn't seem so long ago—and that's because it wasn't—that referring to "the cutting edge of ebook technology" was redundant. Ebook technology itself was the cutting edge: File-based delivery of tomes was the driving force behind all of the messy disruption in so many publishing houses in the last 10 years.

Launching the exclusive e-book store of the biggest-selling book series of all time was no mean feat.

J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore, the exclusive retailer of the Harry Potter e-books and digital audiobooks, needed an e-commerce platform that could stand up to the challenge.

After reviewing the options, Pottermore chose Intershop’s Enfinity E-Commerce platform to power the launch of its exclusive Pottermore Shop.

Los Angeles, CA (July 31, 2012) SAGE Open recently published its 100th journal article after winning its first award, the 2012 APEX Award for Publishing Excellence. SAGE Open was launched in May 2011 as SAGE’s premiere open access journal and the first broad based open access journal to publish academic research from the full spectrum of social science disciplines. The success of this journal has lead to the recent announcement of three new open access journals for SAGE: SAGE Open Engineering, SAGE Open Medical Case Reports, and SAGE Open Medicine.

As part of a seismic shift in online learning that is reshaping higher education, Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, will announce on Tuesday that a dozen major research universities are joining the venture. In the fall, Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally. Even before the expansion, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, the founders of Coursera, said it had registered 680,000 students in 43 courses with its original partners, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University

We'd say it's about time. Although it's almost two years late to the party, Barnes & Noble is responding to Amazon's Kindle for the Web with Nook for Web. Much like its counterpart across the virtual aisle, the Nook web edition lets readers browse free samples and whole books entirely from a web browser while preserving the bookmarking and layout options we've come to know and love.