(Press Release) Austin, Texas, May 20, 2010—LibreDigital Inc. today announced that it has closed an $8.1 million Series C funding round led by new investor S3 Ventures with participation from existing investors Adams Capital Management and Triangle Peak Partners. The company's other key investors include HarperCollins Publishers, The New York Times Company and Noro-Moseley Partners. The new capital infusion will be used by LibreDigital to expand e-book services for publishers looking to capitalize on the unprecedented demand for e-books, which is being driven by the release of new devices like the Apple iPad. In addition to being a top Apple e-book aggregator, LibreDigital also powers the delivery of content to other digital devices and marketplaces, including Barnes & Noble NOOK, Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Google Editions and many more.
Libre Digital
At the Frankfurt Book Fair, LibreDigital presented new data on how readers have sampled book content online over the past 18 months. According to LibreDigital, it has powered more than 500 million page views of sample book chapters and content for publishers, authors, retailers and social-networking sites.
With the advent of electronic ink, or e-ink, the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle and the .epub formatting protocols, the era of the e-book in the United States may be on its way. If you are a publisher or book producer, sooner or later you will be delivering electronic versions of all of your titles for distribution through a burgeoning network of electronic channels—if you’re not already doing so. It may be tomorrow, it may be next year or possibly later, but I guarantee the need to do so will be thrust upon you by the marketplace. While it is true that complex
The biggest news in book retailing so far this year may be Borders’ opening its first “concept store,” a new generation of superstores unveiled in February in the company’s hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich. At 28,900 square feet, the new store—the first of 14 planned to open this year—does not skimp on size, and a lot of that space is taken up by innovative features: shop-within-a-shop “destination zones” for travel, cooking, wellness, graphic novels and children’s categories; bold, new architectural designs; and a “digital center” offering services ranging from book downloading to self-publishing. “Our mission is to be a headquarters for knowledge
Green was the fashionable color on Monday evening, March 10, as more than 200 publishing industry executives gathered for a unique celebration in the Marquis Ballroom of the Marriott Marquis in New York’s Times Square, during the Publishing Business Conference & Expo. It wasn’t an early St. Patty’s Day celebration either, but a celebration honoring the recipients of the 2nd Annual SustainPrint Leadership Awards, recognizing achievements and leadership in “green” publishing. The awards—established in 2007 by SustainPrint.com (the Web site produced by book business and publishing executive magazines to cover environmental sustainability in printing and publishing)—recognize book- and magazine-publishing companies each year for outstanding
“We are leading the pack by building a digital warehouse, which is the digital equivalent of our print warehouse,” commented Jane Friedman, president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers, in the May issue of Book Business. This is the ultimate sign-off on the industry’s embrace of the future, and its take-back of content control from trailblazers such as Google, Amazon and Yahoo. For some years now, various technology vendors have enabled publishers to deliver electronically formatted versions of their titles for special purposes. These have included applications such as conversions to XML formats (e.g., Publishing Dimensions), proprietary e-book reader formats (Mobipocket), sight-impaired applications (National
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, an independent, London-based publishing house known for literary novels, children’s and reference book publishing, has collaborated with LibreDigital, a division of NewsStand Inc., on the new Bloomsbury ‘Look Inside’ online service. The service reportedly allows readers to search and preview the company’s book content on the Internet in a format that replicates the look of a printed book. Bloomsbury is currently digitizing a number of its books for the service, which will be utilized on a number of Bloomsbury divisions’ Web sites, including Bloomsbury USA, Walker & Company, A&C Black and Berlin Verlag. The new service will be available to booksellers
