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We've learned this year that there's no sitting still in the publishing world. To that end, we here at Book Business are excited to share some big personnel news in our own shop.

Mark Cuban has 335,000 friends on Facebook and 760,000 followers on Twitter. Monday, the Internet billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team will test just how friendly those fans really are. Mr. Cuban has written a 30,000-word e-book, "How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It". To drive sales, Mr. Cuban plans to tap all his online followers.

Ads for e-books are likely to increase as the number of self-published titles continue to grow. E-reader ads received a big push earlier this year when Amazon.com unveiled a Kindle with software to show ads to readers. General Motors, Buick, Procter & Gamble’s Olay skin products and Visa were among the first advertisers.

The future of media turns out to be a return to the past. Think back to an age before mass media and subsequent fragmentation; we had one thing that we could rely on: the story. We need stories that are as dynamic as they are timeless, changing to greet contemporary audiences. Like folklore, brands must tell stories that are colored by the audience, its participation, and its re-telling of the story. Simply, we must let go.

Rakuten, the Toronto based eCommerce company, has announced that it intends to purchase Kobo—an eReading specialist—in a deal valued at $315m.

Kobo had become an increasingly potent competitor to Rakuten in recent years, launching a range of innovative eReaders and a wide range of eReading apps into the eBook marketplace.

Kobo today announced that the new Kobo Vox eReader, the world's first social eReader, is now available in stores and online at leading retailers

Want some sass with that app? You should, if you want to get noticed in the increasingly crowded app marketplace, where your app needs to be clever, engaging and useful to pique a potential user's interest. Book Business toiled away in the app mines and unearthed these gems in which publishers do creative, fun or powerful things with book apps to really hook audiences.

Like Kobo’s Reading Life, the Subtext app lets readers read and discuss books within the pages of a digital book with a community of friends. Readers can add links and have what the company is describing as “Facebook style discussions” around the book. Authors and scholars can also participate (Think DVD audio commentary for books).

The first iPod was revealed quietly at a presentation by Steve Jobs on 23 October 2001 and was in stores a month later. The music industry reacted not by examining the successes of P2P and iTunes and working on their own digital music platform, but with DRM (digital rights management), restrictions that attempted to prevent the buyer from copying music.

With the introduction of the Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon will replace its Mobi file format with a new KF8 format that allows developers to use HTML5–a programming language that works across different platforms. At Mediabistro’s Socialize West conference this week, Moblyng CEO Stewart Putney shared five reasons why developers should consider building HTML5 apps instead of designing apps for the Apple App Store or the Android App Store.