Universal

After 25 years of providing physical editions of movies, television shows, music albums, and more recently, audiobooks, Midwest Tape today announced that eBooks will be added to its hoopla digital platform later this year. hoopla digital currently offers participating libraries and their patrons over 170,000 titles in music, movies, TV shows, and audiobooks through its state-of-the-art app and website.

A book trailer is a kind of content that supports a book promotional campaign. It started in the late 90s in the US. Since then, the type of content available on video format has become increasingly diverse. When we speak of book trailer, we are doing so more general terms and include audio-visual productions such as teasers, or video-interviews with the author or the publisher, video summaries, video recommendations from readers or literary industry players, etc..

Simon and Schuster Children's Books today announced a worldwide publication agreement with Ringo Starr for a picture book edition of his famous Beatles hit, Octopus's Garden, 45 years after the song was first written.

The book will be published as a hardback edition plus CD, with audio content to include an original, previously un-heard music track from Ringo and a reading of the story.

Ben Cort, the illustrator of Aliens Love Underpants and a life-long Beatles fan, has been signed up to illustrate the book.

Samantha Smith will join Scholastic UK on May 20th as Fiction Publisher. Samantha is currently Editorial Director at Little Brown, where she has worked with authors including P.C. and Kristin Cast, Chris Colfer and Stephenie Meyer.  She will report to Hilary Murray Hill, MD of Scholastic Children’s Books, who has overall responsibility for Scholastic’s trade publishing in the UK.  

Hilary commented, ‘‘Samantha’s appointment will enhance our exceptional editorial team and take the Scholastic fiction list forward in new directions.  I am absolutely delighted that we will be working together”. Samantha said, ''I'm thrilled to be joining Scholastic. It's a house with a brilliant publishing history, one that I very much grew up with, but that remains a vibrant and dynamic part of children's publishing today and is incredibly well-placed to meet the challenges of the market going forward. I'm looking forward to working with the in-house team and their outstanding authors.”

She is the undisputed queen of 'mummy porn' - her erotic tales of romance and bondage having both titillated and inspired millions of housewives across the world. And now Fifty Shades of Grey author E L James is to release a new book called 'Inner Goddess'. But fans dying to once again dive into her steamy world of sexual desire are this time going to have to do it themselves... because this one is a DIY guide on how to write.

Nu-book, the leading North American provider of ereading applications for the publishing industry announced today major enhancements to its ereading technology platform for Android tablets and smartphones. The Android-based ereading platform boasts many of the same features as Nu-book’s acclaimed Universal iOS platform—from rich ereading features, customized for each publishing client, to the easy and seamlessly means book fans can acquire digital works. Book enthusiasts can now enjoy reading both epub and PDF books on their mobile devices.

Universal Studios has decided that enough is enough and has sued the maker of a porn parody of the book 50 Shades of Grey, Smash Pictures. 50 Shades, of course, is that insanely (seriously: insanely) popular erotic novel, and Universal is arguing that the flick hits a little too close to home, so to speak, and isn't a "parody" so much as it's just an adaptation of the book, which Universal holds the rights to.

Pearson, the British media conglomerate, said Thursday that it was in talks to combine its Penguin publishing house with Random House, owned by Bertelsmann of Germany.

The deal, if completed, would bring together two of the biggest book publishers in the world, uniting Penguin and its iconic orange logo with the owner of Crown Publishing and Knopf Doubleday. The combination would create a division with greater scale that could compete in a rapidly evolving e-book market.

Google’s deal to settle a seven-year conflict with five major publishers over the search giant’s book-scanning initiative is a milestone in the publishing industry’s grinding transition from print books to e-books. The pact, struck by Google and the Association of American Publishers (AAP), does not address the underlying question of whether Google violated copyright law by scanning millions of books over the last several years. Both sides, apparently weary of legal wrangling, have agreed to disagree on that point. The deal also doesn’t affect an ongoing lawsuit filed against Google by the Authors Guild, which represents thousands of authors.

Last year when it launched its Nook Tablet Barnes & Noble strongly hinted that it was looking to add a video service to the device that would allow users to buy and rent movies and television shows.

Well, it took a little longer than expected, but today the company has announced that it's launching Nook Video this fall in the U.S. and the UK this "holiday season" with content from major studios, including HBO, Sony, Starz, and Warner Bros, and Disney.