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Olive Software and Plastic Logic have announced a partnership that will enable major magazines, newspapers and online publishers to distribute their content on Plastic Logic's forthcoming eReader

As a congresswoman, Patricia S. Schroeder pressed presidents and legislators for welfare, women's rights and military-spending reform. Then, during her 12-year term as president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), she planted seeds for battles against copyright infringement and illiteracy. The next role she plans to grow into is retirement, usually the proving ground for gardeners and grandparents, in a way that may incorporate cultivation of a different sort.

On Tuesday, novelist Danielle Steel released 71 of her works, including the new "One Day at a Time," as digital downloads on Amazon.com and The eBook Store by Sony, representing the largest online release by an author in a single day. This is the first time Steel's books, which are published by Random House division Bantam Dell, have been made available in digital format.

Nominations for the Publishing Innovator of the Year Awards, produced by Publishing Executive and Book Business magazines, are now being accepted at www.PubExec.com/vote. The Publishing Innovator of the Year Awards celebrate and honor leadership and innovation in the rapidly evolving magazine and book publishing industries. The awards are given to two deserving publishing companies each year.

Book publishers are up against tough competition for readers’ attention, and nowhere is this more evident than in a Google search. On a search results page, we not only compete against other book titles and authors, but we also compete with our own distribution channels, free Web content, video, news and even Google’s own scanned copies of our books. If you find yourself frustrated that you don’t rank in Google as high as you think you should, you’re not alone. So what’s a book publisher to do?

Implementing a new content management system (CMS)—whether a traditional CMS, a Web CMS (often called a WMS), or both—is, to say the least, a daunting task. Integrating past content and anticipating future needs, all while trying to meet the requirements of present constituents, leaves the process riddled with potential for missteps. It’s no wonder experts in CMS implementation stress the need for adequate preparation.

Two events occurred recently that some have called the biggest news to hit the industry in decades. First was the announcement of the settlement between Google, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Authors Guild, regarding Google’s controversial Book Search tool. The settlement allows Google to make millions of books available for consumers to read or buy through Google Book Search; but the big news is that Google will provide compensation to publishers and authors for their works. The settlement also established a Books Rights Registry (supported by the $125 million settlement paid by Google), which will monitor such compensation as well as work to resolve any additional disputes.

With a battered economy dragging down just about every retail sector, a salient fact making headlines has been the ability of discounters to maintain sales growth—a sure sign that the “Wal-Mart Effect” has permeated every corner of the business world, and that raising prices is probably not the way to realize profits. This leaves cost-cutting, which, for obvious reasons, book publishers would like to pursue aggressively without sacrificing either product quality or valued employees. Here are some tips from a cross-section of the publishing world for reining in costs without sacrificing too much in the process.

The Internet has changed the way that publishing companies market books, providing a myriad of new opportunities. But marketers shouldn’t forget lower-tech methods of getting the word out. Here, some experts explain how they promote their books using both the latest and the more traditional methods.

A commercially viable, point-of-sale, print-on-demand (POD) option—a device capable of creating a single perfect-bound paperback book at a time—has remained, up until this point, beyond the book industry's reach. With the announcement last week of New York-based On Demand Books' newest version of its Espresso Book Machine, set to roll out early next year for initial testing, the current age of printing and distribution as we have come to know it may be on the verge of a major transformation.