Google

A slew of new web domains are dramatically changing the face of the Internet by providing more tailored domains beyond ".com" and ".net" that speak to websites specific interests. With this sudden rush of new online real estate, publishers can capitalize on the domain expansion to make their websites and products more accessible to readers.

Bestselling science fiction author Hugh Howey, and eBook soundtrack company Booktrack (www.booktrack.com), today announced the winners of The Hugh Howey Booktrack Competition, one of the world's largest literary competitions, with a total prize pool of $20,000

After more than 60 years of success in the European literary market, German publishing giant Bastei Lübbe is venturing into brand new territory and launching projects in the United States for the first time.

Google is allegedly working on a free, open access platform for the research, collaboration and publishing of peer-reviewed scientific journals.

At least, that is apparently what one individual wants us to believe. Wired.co.uk is in possession of a document, sent anonymously, detailing how "Google Science" would bring together existing services such as Google Docs, Google Plus, YouTube and more to create a platform that challenges the paid-for model of scientific publishing and provides academics with an opportunity to connect with each other more efficiently.

Open Education Resources (OER) represents a tectonic shift in education materials. Try typing "mitosis" into Google. Almost every search result on the first few pages is for OER exploring the process of cell division. The same is true for nearly any other concept you type in: "subject-verb agreement," "Pythagorean theorem"--you name it. And what you can find today on the Internet is probably less than one tenth of one percent of the OER out there. Most is trapped on teachers' PCs.

Could free content at scale, distributed for free, break the textbook industry?

For an entire school year Hillsborough, New Jersey, educators undertook an experiment, asking: Is the iPad really the best device for interactive learning?

It's a question that has been on many minds since 2010, when Apple released the iPad and schools began experimenting with it. The devices came along at a time when many school reformers were advocating to replace textbooks with online curricula and add creative apps to lessons. Some teachers welcomed the shift, which allowed their students to replace old poster-board presentations with narrated screencasts

Google and Barnes & Noble are joining forces to tackle their mutual rival Amazon, zeroing in on a service that Amazon has long dominated: the fast, cheap delivery of books.

Starting on Thursday, book buyers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area will be able to get same-day deliveries from local Barnes & Noble stores through Google Shopping Express, Google's fledgling online shopping and delivery service.

Liberio is a new platform (launching today out of private beta) for simple eBook creation and publishing straight from Google Drive. Liberio could be used to create anything form a eBook, magazine, school project, you name it, and from publishing to distributing the finished product.

Its competitors including Leanpub and Inkling are already established, but Liberio is hoping that its approach is simpler than those of their competitors, and with all the tools needed under one roof. Liberio has 3,000+ individuals on the platform after its beta test.

Publishing is all too often, and all too easily, lambasted for all the things it does not do. But we should also acknowledge what has been happening. What publishers have been trying out and in what areas these initiatives have been working. 2014 has already been a sobering year for the business, with the loss of two redoutable indies (both scooped up by Hachette), and a continuing decline in sales of physical books (albeit at a slowing rate). But it has also been a year of innovation

On the website ThePassiveVoice, commenters bring up trade and labor disputes and organizations, and I think these and class warfare comments I've seen elsewhere are spot-on. Trade fiction and narrative nonfiction authors do not have any meaningful representation. There is no group busting balls on behalf of writers, and there are a lot of balls out there to be busted. Amazon, the Big 5, B&N, Apple, Google ... no one is fighting these people for better terms and pay. The Writers' Guild seems to exist to fight Amazon