Elsevier

Interactive e-book publishing platform Inkling announced on Wednesday new, multiyear contracts with two major textbook and medical publishers, deals that will expand the number of titles it offers.

The San Francisco-based company, which makes tools for publishers to create and distribute books for tablets, smartphones, and the Web, is now working with publishers Pearson and Elsevier; The two plan to use Inkling's technology to produce digital versions of their books.

Credo, the industry leader for information skills solutions, today announced that it has launched 12 new and updated Subject and Publisher Collections, adding to the more than 75 collections currently available for perpetual purchase or subscription. Libraries now have even more options for enhancing their Literati solution or Credo Online Reference Service with essential titles including:

• CQ Press Collection: With titles such as The Presidency A to Z, Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion and The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History, the CQ Press Collection offers 16 reference works that cover key topics in US History and Political Science.

Tim O’Reilly has got to be one of the Industry’s most creative and challenging thinkers. He is a pioneer in popularizing the Web 2.0 concept — the social networking and interactive applications of Web usage.  He and his team have built an impressive global enterprise that from its beginnings has been on the leading edge of our movement from the codex to multimedia content in the cloud.

The widespread regard he and O’Reilly Media had achieved in the publishing world for their innovative outreach explains why what could otherwise be considered a sensible business decision, to close down and move on from the TOC conference platform, came as such a jolt — even a sense of betrayal for some.

As TOC described itself in its 2013 conference prospectus, it was all about setting new horizons and a global culture, and about creating a community that would transcend the formal and legacy structures in the industry:

Our country is in the midst of a growing "shop local" movement, urging folks to support their neighborhood stores, eat locally grown produce, and, in general, make staying close to home with their dollars a lifestyle choice.

As publishers, we can take this local movement to heart. You're part of a local scene, wherever you're based. Do you know your nearby colleagues? Get together with them? Attend or even create events that provide opportunities for networking? I urge you to talk to your local colleagues, talk them up, and support them by buying what they write or publish!

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced that six of its books will receive awards from the Text and Academic Authors Association. Four titles will receive the Textbook Excellence Award, better known as a “Texty,” and two titles will receive the Most Promising New Textbook Award. The awards will be presented during a luncheon at the Text and Academic Authors Association 26th Annual Conference in Reno, NV, June 22, 2013.

The Text and Academic Authors Association announced a total of 16 award winners in three categories, including: the 2013 Most Promising New Textbook Award, which recognizes excellence in first year edition textbooks and learning materials and the 2013 Textbook Excellence Award, which recognizes excellence in current textbook and learning materials in their second edition or later.

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, and technology publisher O'Reilly Media today announced that O'Reilly will distribute many of Elsevier's academic, research-focused ebooks. This expands the depth of ebooks available from O'Reilly in areas such as computer security and networking, and includes leading imprints such as Morgan Kaufmann, Syngress, Academic Press, Butterworth-Heinemann, Newnes, and Elsevier with more than 1,200 individual titles.

A distinct sense of déjà vu kicked in Tuesday afternoon as I read a series of outraged tweets decrying the news that Elsevier, the giant publisher of scientific journals, was buying Mendeley, a cloud-based social media research platform popular with academics for such tasks as organizing citations and managing access to articles.

The aggrieved tone was almost exactly the same as the backlash that erupted a few weeks ago when Amazon bought GoodReads — at the time, the largest independent reader community on the Web.

Inkling, maker of the leading publishing platform for high-quality digital content, today publically released Inkling Habitat, a free, collaborative digital publishing environment designed for professionals. Paired with the recently launched Inkling Content Discovery Platform, which enables unparalleled online discovery for nonfiction book content, Inkling now provides the only end-to-end solution for publishers to build, market, and distribute high quality digital books at scale.

RSuite CMS a content management system for publishers, recently joined the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) as an affiliate member. The AEP serves the diverse needs of the entire educational resource community, including publishers, content developers, IT professionals, service providers, researchers, instructors, and communication experts from around the world.

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.