Macmillan Publishing Solutions

As is the case when any emerging technology is shaking up a market, there are facts and misconceptions that surround that technology. When book publishers think about digital printing, several associations-negative and positive-may come to mind: cost-savings, short-runs, low quality, flexible, amateur...

I sometimes feel like I'm the only guy in town (NYC, but I'd include London too) contemplating out loud how Penguin Random House might use its position as by far the biggest commercial trade publisher to make life a bit more difficult for its competitors, which in the first instance means the Following Four: HarperCollins (which is much bigger than the other three), Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. What I mean, of course, is that PRH could use its position to either improve its margins in relation to everybody else

Oxford, UK, 18th November 2014 - Macmillan Distribution (MDL), the award-winning international book distributor, has gone live with its new subscription platform, running on Publishing Technology's advance enterprise system.

BookShout!, the market leader in special and bulk ebook sales to corporations and organizations, announced that they have distributed 9.4M ebook codes in the past 12 months, and expects to double that number by early 2015. With more than 3,000 bulk ebook orders placed by major corporations and universities, BookShout! has experienced accelerated growth as more and more organizations request mass quantities of ebook for events, corporate rewards, and client retention.

Swoon Reads, a young-adult imprint that is part of Macmillan Publishing, is upending the traditional discovery process by using crowdsourcing to select all its titles. By bringing a reality-television-style talent competition to its digital slush pile, the publisher is hoping to find potential best sellers that reflect not editors' tastes but the collective wisdom and whims of the crowd.

"The fans and the readers are more in touch with what can sell," said Jean Feiwel, senior vice president of the Macmillan Children's Publishing Group and publisher of Swoon Reads

Don't look now, but textbook publishers are trying to become software companies. And tech startups are trying to outmaneuver these giants to win the future of educational content and tools. It's one of the big trends in edtech and digital media.

Indeed, digital publishing has "fundamentally changed every aspect of what we are doing with our content," says Michael Hansen, the CEO of Cengage Learning, an education publisher that recently moved headquarters from Connecticut to Boston, while also opening a new office in techie-rich San Francisco.

Publishers are adopting crowdsourcing platforms in order to empower readers and authors without losing them to pure self-publishing platforms.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Thursday expressed concern over a proposed $450 million settlement of claims Apple Inc conspired with five publishers to fix e-book prices, saying its provisions could drastically reduce money paid to consumers depending on appeals.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan said she found "most troubling" a clause requiring Apple to pay only $70 million if an appeals court reversed her finding that the company is liable for antitrust violations and sent it back to her for further proceedings.

Digital Science, a division of the Macmillan publishing giant, has invested an undisclosed amount in London startup called WriteLaTeX, which provides a collaborative paper-writing tool for researchers called Overleaf.

Overleaf is a WYSIWYG editor that allows researchers to work together on scientific documents that use the LaTeX markup language - ubiquitous in the physical sciences in particular - for displaying and typesetting formulae.

Only two of the 5 major US trade publishers have shown an interest in the ebook subscription market, and Macmillan is showing signs that they could be the third. Late last week Macmillan announced, via their German parent company Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, that 1,500 Macmillan titles are now available through Skoobe. a German ebook subscription service.

The 1,500 titles are drawn from the US and UK based SF publisher Tor Books. All of the titles are in English, including Ender's Game, Mistborn, and Children of the Mind. As the first and (so far)