Web Development

This webinar looks into critical strategies for making digital products profitable.

Books From Scratch is a collaborative writing platform in which writers submit chapters to continue a story and readers upvote their favorite submissions. And like other crowdsourcing sites, Books From Scratch is dedicated to vetting the best collaborative tales and preparing them for publication.

Google is allegedly working on a free, open access platform for the research, collaboration and publishing of peer-reviewed scientific journals.

At least, that is apparently what one individual wants us to believe. Wired.co.uk is in possession of a document, sent anonymously, detailing how "Google Science" would bring together existing services such as Google Docs, Google Plus, YouTube and more to create a platform that challenges the paid-for model of scientific publishing and provides academics with an opportunity to connect with each other more efficiently.

It sounded like a good idea: fans of cultural figures like Kurt Vonnegut and G.I. Joe get permission to use their favorite characters to create new stories under the umbrella of Amazon, and everyone gets a cut of the profits. So how it did turn out?

So far the results of the project, known as Kindle Worlds, appear lackluster at best. Take the popular series Pretty Little Liars, which became available as an Amazon-licensed fan fiction title last year.

Publishers are adopting crowdsourcing platforms in order to empower readers and authors without losing them to pure self-publishing platforms.

Tablo is a book publishing platform and online reading community that is beginning to make its mark on the industry. Like Wattpad, Tablo allows authors to share their in-progress works with readers and gather feedback to improve those works. The big difference, says founder Ash Davies, is that Tablo can help authors design, monetize, and distribute their work. Below Davies describes how Tablo intends to put publishing power in authors' hands.

Academia.edu is a key player in the movement toward open access scientific publishing, with over 11 million participants who have uploaded nearly 3 million scientific papers to the site. It's easy to understand Price's frustration with the current model, in which academics donate their time to review articles, pay for the right to publish articles, and pay for access to articles. According to Price, journals charge an average of $4000 per article: $1500 for production costs (reformatting, designing), $1500 to orchestrate peer review

Wattpad, an online writing and reading community, has acquired the Red Room, an online community originally described as a "Facebook for authors." The Red Room site will be subsumed into Wattpad and go offline beginning July 8.

Former Red Room authors are invited to create new accounts at Wattpad. A spokesperson for Wattpad said former Red Room authors will "have to create a Wattpad account and migrate their stories over themselves." She said that Wattpad has a "dedicated team member on our Community Team who is helping Red Roomers with this transition."

On Christmas Eve Day in 2012, I sat in a Starbucks and wrote an enthusiastic post about why it had been the year of the e-single. E-singles - works of journalism between 3,000 to 15,000 words, usually nonfiction and sold as individual ebooks - were "a true digital-native format," I wrote, "the format for our time," ideal to read curled up with your iPad. With the crash and burn of Byliner this year, however, my enthusiasm seems less than prescient. Byliner, which launched in 2011, was one of the darlings of the literary startup scene

In this webinar, you will hear from industry leaders about: Critical market trends, and on-demand and digital technologies.