HarperCollins

With an unusually heavy spring for Young Adult débuts ahead in 2014, publishers are increasingly reliant on social media to deliver YA sales.

Platforms including Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest and BookTubers are now "the best opportunity to build loyal readers, which then leads to sales," said Sarah Benton, head of marketing at Hot Key Books.

Three 'cons' are converting the way books are read -consumerism, convergence and concurrence. And Brian Murray knows the three cons like the back of his hand. After all, he runs a 3,000-people organization spread across a major part of the English-speaking world. On a dull October afternoon, the 47-yearold President and CEO of the $1.19 billion HarperCollins Publishers, engages with CD on the future of the book:

In July, a US district court judge found "compelling evidence" that Apple Inc. (AAPL) had been guilty of conspiring with no less than five major book publishers to raise the price of e-books, in an effort to take a bite out of the dominance of leading online retailer Amazon.com (AMZN)

The latest company making a bid to bring the subscription model to the book world is one that may already be familiar to TechCrunch readers - social publishing service Scribd. Scribd first launched in 2007, offering users a platform for users to share documents and other written content. We use it ourselves as a way to upload and embed documents that are relevant to our stories. For Scribd, moving into the subscription books business doesn't seem like a huge leap, and several of the most important pieces are already in place.

Reading a book is a solitary activity, not a social one. There are exceptions, like reading aloud to a child or a shut-in, but for the most part, reading is something you do by yourself.

Book Business and Publishing Executive magazines have announced the winners of the 2013 Publishing Innovator of the Year Awards. Active Interest Media, Sourcebooks, and the American Physical Society have been selected as this year's winners. This award recognizes publishing companies who have demonstrated significant innovation in the past year. A winner is chosen from each of the following three categories: book, magazine, and scientific, technical & medical (STM) publishers.

Why do we buy books? Well, until very recently, there were few other ways to get them. We could go to a library, or borrow them from people we knew. Otherwise, we had to buy them. And, until recently, buying them meant buying objects, the sturdy real things, and keeping them somewhere-neatly in bookshelves, dangerously in basements, or resignedly in boxes left unpacked from the last move. E-books made ownership easier but less sure. Hold up your Kindle or your tablet or your smart phone and give it a shake

By now, we've all gotten pretty used to not owning stuff-at least in the traditional, hold-it-in-your-hands sense. If you're anything like me, your DVD collection stopped growing a few years back once Netflix and Hulu bolstered their offerings. And that CD storage stand (hell, even your iTunes account) has probably gathered dust thanks to Spotify and Rdio. But books? Turns out, we're still content to pay $10 for a paperless novel that we're not even certain we'll like or finish.

Amazon.com is already doing it with CDs. Now, it's turning its focus to books. The Seattle online retailer today unveiled a new service called Kindle MatchBook. Basically, it allows customers who've purchased books via Amazon.com over the past 15 years to convert those titles into Kindle copies, allowing readers to enjoy them in the new format.

At first blush, 2012 was not a good year for independent Canadian book publishing. It began with Random House, owned by German conglomerate Bertelsmann, finally and completely swallowing up McClelland & Stewart, the iconic publisher once as central to Canadian culture as the CBC. It ended with 42-year-old Vancouver-based Douglas & McIntyre, the largest independent publisher in the country, home to such household names as David Suzuki and Douglas Coupland, essentially filing for bankruptcy protection. Reports in the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail portrayed an industry in apparent free-fall