The Book Industry Study Group

Book manufacturers and publishers used to squeeze each other to cut costs at the other's expense. Now they are cutting costs together in partnerships of convenience. Welcome to 2004. It's like 2003, only the recession's grip has lessened. Production managers continue to shave a penny here, save a dollar there, while keeping up hope that the vaunted recovery will hit their employer's slice of the book publishing industry soon. Meanwhile, large retail and bookstore chains are returning books by the truckload, according to industry regulars. This dilutes revenues and increases costs for the publishers, leaving them with diminished cash flow and pinched

By Donna Loyle Some of the country's largest book publishing companies recently unveiled major new electronic-book initiatives, bringing renewed energy into the e-book arena. Time Warner's iPublish.com at Time Warner Books, New York City, scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2001, will offer fiction and non-fiction content created specifically for the Internet, according to company officials. Meanwhile, Random House and Simon & Schuster, along with Microsoft, gave away copies of Michael Crichton's new novel Timeline, as well as some "Star Trek" series novels, all downloadable onto Microsoft's new e-book Reader software. In June, CBS News and Simon & Schuster, both owned by Viacom, co-published an exclusive

The understanding of metadata needs to be expanded. Perhaps your work brings you in contact with a part of the metadata chain, but the true value of metadata is better understood from a bird’s-eye view.

The importance of metadata goes beyond books and magazines. It's increasingly essential to all media: print, ebooks, images, videos--it's what makes it all work together.