Sourcebooks Inc.

A new partnership between Naperville, Ill.-based published Sourcebooks and Toronto-based writing community Wattpad will result in published print and ebooks and will bring Sourcebooks and its authors closer to the growing workshopping platform.

First, Sourcebooks will edit and and distribute several select Wattpad manuscripts under its young adult imprint, Sourcebooks Fire. The titles will be made available in print and ebook formats and distributed to physical and online bookstores around the world.

WILMINGTON, N.C., Sept. 3, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- eReatah (www.eReatah.com), a groundbreaking e-book subscription service that offers 80,000+ titles spanning every genre, launched its private beta today.  Available for all iPads, iPhones (iOS) and Android devices, the Web- and app-based service allows users to choose from three different plans and acquire e-books for 20 - 40+% less than their average retail price.

US publisher Sourcebooks has acquired Simple Truths, a specialist inspirational and motivational books publisher. It is the 15th company acquisition that Sourcebooks has made since it was established in 1987, and is confirmed as its largest purchase to date. Simple Truths was founded in 2005 by Mac Anderson, selling direct to consumers through its website and currently has 100 backlist and forthcoming titles.

I have been assembling BEA take-aways from the lively and informative reports of seasoned observers and trade professionals, without having attended in person. These provided me a lot to chew on, along with vivid memories of sitting through panel presentations, hiking through the aisles and corridors, and schmoozing at the booths at the Javits Center. They have added more substance to what I otherwise learn working with new business development and online publication services each day.

OverDrive has launched a pilot program that will allow millions of library patrons to check out the same eBook all at once during a two-week period. The Big Library Read project will let members of more than 7,500 libraries globally simultaneously access The Four Corners of the Sky by Michael Malone.

Tim O’Reilly has got to be one of the Industry’s most creative and challenging thinkers. He is a pioneer in popularizing the Web 2.0 concept — the social networking and interactive applications of Web usage.  He and his team have built an impressive global enterprise that from its beginnings has been on the leading edge of our movement from the codex to multimedia content in the cloud.

The widespread regard he and O’Reilly Media had achieved in the publishing world for their innovative outreach explains why what could otherwise be considered a sensible business decision, to close down and move on from the TOC conference platform, came as such a jolt — even a sense of betrayal for some.

As TOC described itself in its 2013 conference prospectus, it was all about setting new horizons and a global culture, and about creating a community that would transcend the formal and legacy structures in the industry:

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.

The Independent Book Publishers Association will hold its annual Publishing University in Chicago in just a few weeks, on April 26th and 27th.  The organization was founded thirty years ago by what president Florrie Kichler calls a “group of small publishers who couldn’t get their books out anywhere into the trade.”

Disparate. Collegial. Decentralized. Collaborative.

If Chicago publishing professionals agree on one thing about the city's publishing scene, it's that it is not easy to characterize. About to celebrate 175 years as a major publishing hub (Chicago's first publisher, Robert Fergus, set up shop in 1839), today the city is ranked second in the printing and publishing industry, behind New York.

Some of the area's earliest publishers still survive, among them Rand McNally (est. 1856). Many houses are long gone, for example Reilly and Britton, which published L. Frank Baum's beloved Oz books. Some, like Scott, Foresman & Co. have been absorbed by other publishers. In fact, if Chicago publishing professionals lament one change that has taken place over the past decade or so, it is consolidation, to which a number of local publishers have fallen victim.

In the days when books were only available in wearable and tearable bound editions, it made sense for buyers to pay money upfront. But with the advent of e-books, that model may no longer be desirable or even necessary, contends Israel-based entrepreneur Yoav Lorch. Lorch, who is also a published author, is the founder and CEO of Total Boox, a web and app-based system in early beta that lets you "read first, pay later."