Google

The Nook HD and Nook HD+ e-readers now have access to the full Google Play store, according to a press release Friday from Barnes and Noble. The move knocks down a major wall between Barnes and Noble’s products and their status as real, fully formed Android tablets, putting them a step ahead of competitor Amazon’s Kindle Fires.

The Nook HD and HD+ were released last fall as 7-inch and 9-inch devices, respectively, running a heavily modified, forked version of Android 4.0.

When EPUB 3.0 was officially unveiled at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, 2011, it was taken by many as the spec to end all specs.

At last, we could really get to work creating ebooks with all the things we’d always wished for — basic things like the sophisticated typography and layout we can do in print, and beyond-print features like video and interactivity — as well as some things we hadn’t thought to want, like global language support and rich metadata. Not to mention something we knew we should do but that was “too hard” before: real accessibility. Best of all, we could make just one file that would work the same everywhere…

The euphoria didn’t last long. Sure, EPUB 3 told us how to do all those things; but did they all actually work anywhere?

That was 18 months ago. Guess what? Progress happens.

As the Book Industry Study Group report "Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education" suggests, things are changing, and fast, for higher education publishing. And the Supreme Court's decision in Kirtsaeng V. Wiley is only going to hasten the speed at which higher ed publishers move to digital platforms for course content.

Enter GinkgoTree, a fresh-faced start-up from a group of former academics who, after bemoaning the lack of a cheaper alternative to expensive textbooks and a more elegant alternative to online course packs, decided that theirs was the solution they were waiting for.

Atavist, a multimedia storytelling platform which launched in January 2011, has received acclaim for its unique mix of longform journalism and an innovative content management system. In fact, the company has already received high-profile investment backing from the likes of Marc Andreessen and Google's Eric E. Schmidt. Co-founder, CEO and editor Evan Ratliff says: "We are this kind of hybrid outfit in that we're not solely focused on software or publishing. We are a media and a software company."

This media/software combo wasn't in the original plan. The initial goal was to be an innovator in the space called longform journalism, pieces of 5,000 to 30,000 words meant to be read in one sitting. "We started as an outfit that just wanted to do publishing, and a certain type of publishing: These short [pieces] between book and magazine [length]," says Ratliff — books that would be "multimedia" and "enhanced." "In order to that, we ended up developing our own publishing software to publish to multiple devices at the same time."

The school has an unconventional take on the iPad’s purpose. The devices are not really valued as portable screens or mobile gaming devices. Teachers I talked to seemed uninterested, almost dismissive, of animations and gamelike apps. Instead, the tablets were intended to be used as video cameras, audio recorders, and multimedia notebooks of individual students’ creations. The teachers cared most about how the devices could capture moments that told stories about their students’ experiences in school. Instead of focusing on what was coming out of the iPad …

Today, it appears that Google, despite selling the Frommer's name, has retained the brand's social data and is integrating it with what is now called Zagat Travel. “Google is keeping all of the followers that Frommer’s accrued on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest.” PaidContent writes. “These thousands—or more likely millions—of accounts are valuable because they represent a huge collection of serious travel enthusiasts.”

The move became known when Google changed the name of the Twitter handle @FrommersTravel to @ZagatTravel today…

Jason Merkoski was a founding member of the Amazon team that launched the Kindle. He no longer works at Amazon, and in a new ebook, Burning the Page: The Ebook Revolution and the Future of Reading (Sourcebooks, ebook $9.99) he discusses how the Kindle came to be, the features it (and other e-ink readers) lack, and what he imagines the future of digital reading will look like.

Merkoski ran technology departments for a number of companies and headed e-commerce initiatives at Motorola before joining Amazon as a technology manager in 2005.

Google acquired Frommer’s Travel Guides from Wiley in 2012 — and then, last month, reportedly decided to stop publishing them as print editions. Now Arthur Frommer, the 83-year-old founder of the brand, has bought Frommer’s back from Google and will continue publishing the travel guides in print and digital editions.

The AP reported the news Wednesday night and quoted Frommer saying, “It’s a very happy time for me. We will be publishing the Frommer travel guides in ebook and print formats and will also be operating the travel site Frommers.com.”

Remember the old days when PDF was pretty much the only way to distribute content and those PDFs were read on computer screens? PDF still lives, of course, but now we're also faced with offering content in mobi and EPUB formats for consumption on a variety of platforms and devices.

SPi Global released a free whitepaper this week that covers the current state of formats and platforms. It's called Demystifying the King: Making Content Available to All and you can download it here.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – April 1, 2013 – CapstoneYoungReaders.com was recently honored by the Web Marketing Association with the 2013 Internet Advertising Competition Award for excellence in online advertising. A prestigious panel of the best in the internet advertising community, including professionals from CNN News Group, Google, IBM Interactive, Ogilvy Interactive, and PayPal, judged the entries on criteria such as creativity, innovation, impact, design, and copywriting. The IAC awarded CapstoneYoungReaders.com with “Best Publishing Site.”