Elsevier

Sixty new publishers add content to Ingram's VitalSource e-textbook platform to reach the education market
December 4, 2012

[PRESS RELEASE] NASHVILLE, TN ­ Vital Source Technologies, Inc., Ingram Content Group's leading e-textbook solution for publishers, academic institutions, and students, today announced that sixty new publishers have added more than 35,000 new digital textbooks and online course materials to its VitalSource Bookshelf® platform. "The students of today are using technology to their advantage, and we are experiencing significant growth in the number of publisher, institutional, and reseller customers using the VitalSource Bookshelf platform," said Kent Freeman, Chief Operating Officer, Vital Source Technologies, Inc. "We will continue to nurture our publisher relationships and expand and diversify our title selection to provide the digital content that's in demand by students and educators worldwide."

RSuite 4 Delivers a Breakthrough in Content Management for Publishers
November 29, 2012

Audubon, Pa.—November 29, 2012—RSuite CMS, a content management system for publishers, today announced the latest version of its software, RSuite 4. Combining a superior user experience with proven and secure content management provides publishers with the ability to use the best of today’s technologies to create, store, manage, transform, and deliver any content to any format.

RSuite CMS, powered by MarkLogic®, has been the software of choice for many of the world’s leading publishers. RSuite 4 offers a redesigned, more intuitive user experience to enable users to efficiently find and interact with their content with minimal effort. Improved usability is based on Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics and manifested in action-oriented contextual menus, search-based content navigation, accordion-style search results, and a user interface (UI) with intentional color design. The new UI provides even greater productivity while dramatically reducing the learning curve.

Show Notes: Reporting from the RSuite User Conference
September 20, 2012

Book Business is reporting today from the RSuite CMS User Conference at the Cira Center in our hometown of Philadelphia.

The morning sessions, delivered to a packed house at the Cira Center’s Hub (just upstairs from the fantastic Jose Garces restaurant J.G. Domestic) have included a case study from Elsevier Health Science on “Managing Book and Journal Content with RSuite CMS to achieve an E-First Workflow”; a presentation from RSI’s metadata guru Lisa Bos titled “Search as the Center of the Customer Experience: How Metadata Management is the Key Component of Findability”; and a panel featuring SPi Global’s VP Solutions Architect John Prabhu, Merion Matters’ CIO Khader Mohammed and the American Institute of Physics’ CIO, Publishing, Evan Owens.

Elsevier Launches eBook Legacy Collection on ScienceDirect
September 20, 2012

 Elsevier announced it has digitized its Legacy Collection in seven disciplines, significantly expanding its content on ScienceDirect. With the addition of the Legacy Collection to ScienceDirect, highly relevant, scientific books from the mid-20th century to the present will be accessible online as early as December 2012.

Inside the Ebook Test Kitchen
September 1, 2012

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.

Keeping Dr. Google Away
September 1, 2012

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.

Stick to Your Ribs: Governance and the Not-for-Profit Publisher
August 8, 2012

I have often reflected on a passage from Jared Diamond's magisterial ”Guns, Germs, and Steel” when the question of the relative success of for-profit and not-for-profit (NFP) publishing enterprises comes up. Although there are some conspicuous exceptions, most of the big dogs in scholarly communications are commercial enterprises.  What is it about the for-profit world of publishing that has enabled it to become dominant over its well-intended, hard-working fellows in the NFP camp?

Scientific publishing: Brought to book
July 19, 2012

IF THERE is any endeavour whose fruits should be freely available, that endeavour is surely publicly financed science. Morally, taxpayers who wish to should be able to read about it without further expense. And science advances through cross-fertilisation between projects. Barriers to that exchange slow it down.

There is a widespread feeling that the journal publishers who have mediated this exchange for the past century or more are becoming an impediment to it. One of the latest converts is the British government.

Chicago Startup Scholastica Disrupts Academic Publishing
June 20, 2012

Scholastica, a publishing platform for scholarly journals, gives power back to the academic community by allowing new and existing journals to manage article submissions and publish their Open Access (OA) content without the need for expensive contracts with large academic publishing companies.

Unpacking Books: E-books have matured but questions remain about digital rights, access models and what a scholarly e-book really means today
April 15, 2012

Nine experts weigh in on scholarly publishing and ebooks:

Suzanne BeDell, managing director, Science and Technology Books, Elsevier:

When we talk about e-books we mean books to be read on devices and e-readers, which all our books are, in all e-book formats. One third of our e-book sales last year came through Amazon but access on the iPad is increasing. Our e-books are also available through the B&N platform on the Nook device and through Google Books too. It requires considerable work and investment to manage and support the different feeds…