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HarperCollins CEO Paints Positive Picture for Publishing
December 12, 2013

Despite perceptions that the publishing business is troubled, or even facing the same tumult of the music business, the CEO of HarperCollins said that the growth in digital book sales were improving margins and even royalty rates for authors, and even creating ways to test variable pricing for e-books once they are released.

At the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference on Wednesday, HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray said that the industry was "not going the way of the music business," with digital publishing translating into greater consumption of books purchased, he noted.

Apple-Samsung Tablet Tussle Upends Ereaders for Holidays
December 12, 2013

Diana Dawson has over the years bought her twin children digital cameras, e-book readers and media players as Christmas presents. This holiday season, she's covering those bases with one device: a tablet computer.

"They do it all," Dawson said outside an Apple Inc. store in Walnut Creek, California, after buying iPads for her now 27-year-old daughters.

Dawson’s purchasing underscores the changes roiling the consumer-electronics market. While the industry once benefited from year-end sales in categories from cameras to printers to desktop personal computers, this holiday period brings the clearest signs yet that

Google Play Books Gets Huge Update
December 11, 2013

Google always seems to layer it on thick when it comes to updates with their own apps. Updates happen often, and they usually come along with massive amounts of bug fixes if they’re needed and quite a few new features to spice things up a bit. Google Play Books is just one of the many apps that they offer in the Play Store (and one that also comes pre-installed on just about every Android device)and today Google just dropped a pretty huge update for it.

The Artful Accidents of Google Books
December 6, 2013

"It was while looking at Google's scan of the Dewey Decimal Classification system that I saw my first one-the hand of the scanner operator completely obscuring the book's table of contents," writes the artist Benjamin Shaykin. What he saw disturbed him: it was a brown hand resting on a page of a beautiful old book, its index finger wrapped in a hot-pink condom-like covering. In the page's lower corner, a watermark bore the words "Digitized by Google."

Metadata and the National Book Awards
November 22, 2013

Noted in NPR's Thursday, November 21 report on the National Book Award winners was that "a visibly shocked (James) McBride accepted the fiction prize. Considered the clear underdog, he said he wouldn't have minded if any of the other finalists won because they 'are all fine writers.'"

McBride's novel The Good Lord Bird is about a young slave (delightfully named 'Little Onion') who joins the abolitionist John Brown in his anti-slavery mission.

Building A Social Hive
November 19, 2013

We spoke with publishing experts whose social media strategies have yielded loyal followings. They share 25 ways to make your social efforts more effective in 2014.

New Study Reveals Strength of Copyright Industries
November 19, 2013

A new study released today by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) reveals that core copyright industries contributed more than $1 trillion in value in 2012 to the U.S. economy (almost 6.5% of the total U.S. GDP). The study, Copyright Industries in the U.S. Economy: The 2013 Report, records the economic influence and contributions of industries in the U.S. dealing with the creation, production, distribution, broadcasting and exhibition of copyright materials. 

Why The Google Books Ruling Might Impact You And Your Books
November 19, 2013

Each summer, we would go as a family to Gettysburg to watch the Civil War re-enactments of the great battle and the turning of the tide of the war in the Union favor.  We walked around the battlefields and the staged campsites, and my father planted bullets he had bought at antique markets for us to "find."  Together we pretended to hold the Union line on Little Round Top where Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain led the fabled 20th Maine in a heroic stand.  

The Future Was Yesterday!
November 15, 2013

Some of you, over the last week, may have noticed me proclaiming the coming of the future… The Futurist Panel, that is. Yesterday we convened the first of what will be a monthly gathering of forward-thinking publishing experts. In a wide-ranging 30-minute conversation, this insightful group began some interesting inquiries into how publishing has changed and will continue to morph, and how its future identity might shape up. 


Google Books: 1, Authors: 0 in Landmark Ruling
November 15, 2013

The eight-year-long legal battle over Google Books has finally come to a close. A judge ruled on Thursday that the search giant's scanning of millions of books falls under fair use and doesn't infringe the copyrights of the books' authors. The ruling (.PDF), issued by U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin in New York, ends the legal scuffle among the publishing trade group The Authors Guild, several individual authors and Google, as first reported by GigaOM. Google began scanning books in 2004 with the goal of publishing snippets in search results.